1. Water
Although mostly free, it is the most valuable natural resource and commodity in the world. All around the world water sources are being overexploited and polluted, forcing people to dig and search for new sources of water, import water from elsewhere, or buy bottled water. In China, more than 80% of the country’s rural water wells are polluted.
Read this article by us to understand why water is the world’s most precious resource.
2. Sand
One of 21st Century’s most important, but least appreciated, resources and commodities: ordinary sand, has become the backbone of our society. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. It is almost hard to believe that the world is facing a ‘shortage of sand’ – a substance that covers 1/3 of the planet’s land surface area.
Read our article to understand what is the challenge with the way we are currently using sand.
3. Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels (oil, natural gas & coal) supply the vast majority of the world’s energy demands and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But the problems associated with fossil fuels are many. Most immediately, burning fossil fuels warms the planet and acidifies the oceans by releasing carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions into the environment, not to mention it is a non-renewable resource with roughly 133 years left in the ‘earth’s tank’.
4. Palm Oil
Because it is so cheap and versatile, palm oil is the most common vegetable oil in the world, used in everyday products like bread, chocolate, lipstick, and soap. But it is also causing enormous ecological harm in the countries where it’s harvested. Indonesia’s forests are more carbon-rich than the Amazon rainforest, yet palm oil companies are rapidly eliminating them. This includes draining and burning peatlands, which can hold up to 28 times as much carbon as forests.
5. Forests
Trees provide many essential roles — creating and regulating ecosystems, filtering water, absorbing carbon, protecting people from droughts and extreme weather, mitigating floods, and many more. Yet trees are under siege around the world. Roughly 48 football fields worth of trees are lost each minute. And it is estimated that up to 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from cutting down or otherwise destroying trees.
6. Earth (or Soil)
All life on earth depends on the top 20cm of soil and it can take more than a millennium to produce only 1 centimeter of soil, yet humanity has degraded roughly a third of all the world’s soil, according to the UN, and half of all topsoil has been lost in the past 150 years. Since 95% of the food that humans eat comes from soil, the continued degradation of soil poses an existential risk. Read this article by Green Initiatives to understand the ground beneath your feet.
