The twentieth century saw an unprecedented rise in our use of the earth’s resources (a rise that has continued to gain momentum since the start of the new millennium): between 1901 and 2000, the world increased its fossil fuel use by a factor of 12 and its material use by a factor of 34 (and, if we continue using resources at the current rate, we’ll need two earths by 2050). Commentators have long warned that such profligate consumption (and the attending material wastage) is not sustainable, but now with dwindling resource reserves, they’re increasingly worried not just for the environment, but also for the economy and our very way of life in the modern age. Yes, resource security is firmly on the political agenda.

While it was far from the first time any government considered the issue, a clear sign that resource security was gaining in prominence came when, in 2010, the European Union (EU) identified 14 ‘critical’ mineral raw materials for which substantial supply risks existed. The 14 minerals (many of which are required for the electronics that make modern life possible/worth living – like rare earth metals and platinum group metals) were influenced by two distinct threats: ‘supply risk’, relating to the political-economic stability of producing countries, the level of concentration of production, the potential for substitution and the recycling rate; and ‘environmental country risk’, whereby countries that currently have poor sustainability records could take steps to protect the environment, with the knock-on effect of limiting extraction and jeopardising the supply of raw materials to the EU.

The EU followed up its identification of critical materials with a ‘Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe’ in 2011, which called for nothing less than the transformation of the whole economy: ‘Transforming the economy onto a resource-efficient path will bring increased competitiveness and new sources of growth and jobs through cost savings from improved efficiency, commercialisation of innovations and better management of resources over their whole lifecycle.’ The EU has since launched the Critical Raw Materials Innovation Network (or, to give it its slightly-less-catchy acronym: CRM_InnoNet) to drive progress, as well as the European Resource Efficiency Platform to provide ‘high level guidance’ to member states and businesses alike.

Taking its cue from the EU, perhaps, (or from the 80 per cent of UK chief executives who identified resource shortages as a risk to their businesses) our government followed suit with a ‘Resource Security Action Plan’ in March of last year. Recognising increased material demand and price fluctuations as damaging to British industry, Defra and BIS admitted that government had a role to play: ‘Government attention is warranted by a series of market failures: prices for many resources are not reflecting the full environmental cost of extraction, there is a lack of readily available information about resource risks which may affect UK businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and behavioural barriers impede action to improve resource efficiency.’

The resulting actions proposed in the plan included: investigating individual producer responsibility; developing materials flow analyses; funding innovation challenges for extracting value from waste; launching a ‘critical resources dashboard’ to provide companies with ‘the information they need to take more informed decisions on the resource risks to their operations’; and launching an industry-led consortium to address resource opportunities and concerns.

Some of these steps have already been acted upon: the Technology Strategy Board is now supporting seven projects in developing closed-loop practices and is seeking entrants for a design competition for a circular economy related to critical materials; the Environment Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network (ESKTN) launched a pilot of the Resources Dashboard in July (but more on that in a moment); and the industry-led consortium is now known as the Circular Economy Task Force and is entering its second year (turn to page 31 for a summary of the group’s initial report).

The action plan is very business-centric, and when I ask Defra why the approach should be this way, a spokesperson tells me: “We all need to ensure we make the best use of our resources and minimise waste. Doing so is not only good for the environment but for the economy too. The issue isn’t around shortages of resources, it’s about ensuring reliable and sustainable access of materials. We already know that businesses can reduce costs and increase competitiveness by being more resource efficient. While government can set the right framework, it’s up to businesses to assess their own level of risk and take appropriate action.”

And indeed, many businesses – particularly large businesses with considerable supply chain power – have been acting to ensure resource security for a while now, but not everyone was so quick to catch on. David Gardner, Deputy Director of the ESKTN, tells me that when he first started visiting manufacturing businesses during the research stages for the Resources Dashboard, many were unaware of the materials that ultimately made up their products: “People were not relating to the names of the critical materials, because they were so high up the supply chain… When you’re producing an end product that is several manufacturing processes away from the raw material, you don’t necessarily know what’s in your product and therefore how critical it is. All of a sudden, you’ll just find that a material that you use isn’t available to you.”

The ultimate aim of the dashboard is to enable businesses to figure out what materials they might have trouble sourcing and how to get around the various shortages or blockages in material flows. The three-stage process involves first mapping out the business supply chain (considering risk, impact and mitigation), then accessing a repository of case studies and finally using the ‘SharpCloud’ software to ‘visualise relationships between sectors, materials, products, sub-assembly, and resources’.

Gardner notes that the dashboard is a ‘very large’ project, which has only just launched (several months late – but, he says, “with anything like this you just want to make sure that you’re stepping off in the right direction, and you don’t want to do a U-turn a bit later on”). In future, the ESKTN will look to build up its repository of case studies, as well as potentially developing a publicly-available standard for inputting information so as to avoid the problems of the early lifecycle analyses, where it was possible to get very different assessments of the same products.

The dashboard is aimed predominantly at SMEs, companies that cannot exert so much pressure on their supply chain as bigger ones, “to help them see if there’s anything coming up that could potentially impact on their business”, as Gardner explains. He admits, though, that some small businesses won’t necessarily be able to counteract all the resource and supply chain risks they will face in coming years.

But even massive companies can’t control everything and could still find themselves at the sharp end of a resource shock. And it’s not necessarily because resources are limited – sometimes the leanness of the supply chain (limited numbers of companies processing certain materials or producing certain components, for instance) can put resource flows at risk. Gardner cites the surprising example of the whole of the automotive industry being caught out by a material flow problem just last year: “Nylon-12, PA-12 they call it, is used for manufacturing hoses in the automotive industry. And there are plenty of sources of the raw material, but they didn’t realise that there was a manufacturing plant in Germany and not only did they manufacture 25 per cent of the end product, but they manufactured 75 per cent of the precursor to that product – globally. They had a fire there, and 200 executives of the automotive industry met up to say ‘Oh, my word. We’re going to be without this. This is going to put a stop to virtually all the automotive production around the world.’”

Of course, auto production did not stop entirely last year, but the story has a few more twists; Gardner continues: “They were looking for alternatives and they came up with a number of alternatives that they tested fairly quickly and got them onto the market fairly quickly… but one of the substances that Chrysler picked up on for their hoses resulted in a recall of between 20 and 30,000 cars in March of this year, because of the substitution that they used.”

While governments can’t necessarily provide solutions to problems such as that, they do have a role to play, of course (in addition to producing reports, as outlined above). Gardner says legislation and regulation can be real drivers for change, and his statement is echoed by the Circular Economy Task Force, which is made up of a number of large businesses. The inaugural report, ‘Resource Resilient UK’, warns that UK businesses can’t tackle resource risks effectively until the ‘government’s industrial strategy takes them seriously’. Specifically highlighting the role that remanufacturing and reuse can play in resource efficiency, the report urges the government to quantify resource security risks for different business sectors and implement measures to protect resources ‘now’, or risk falling behind competing countries and forcing up prices.

But while certain government action would be welcome, some governments can take things too far, as you could say is happening with the case of China’s near monopoly on rare earth elements. China currently produces more than 90 per cent of these elements (though the discovery of vast reserves in the Pacific Ocean could change this in time), and has slashed its export quotas amidst rumours of territorial ambitions, disgruntlement with Japan over the islands in the East China Sea, and its own economic self interest. (The World Trade Organization is currently considering action brought by the EU, US and Japan, but many expect little to come of the case.)

No one expects the various governments to invade China over the matter, but the political rift brings me to by far the ugliest aspect of resource scarcity: resource conflict. Access to resources has played a key part in many clashes throughout history, but there are concerns that these sorts of disputes will become more widespread and have even more devastating consequences. A 2012 Chatham House report ‘Resources Futures’ warned that ‘volatility is the new normal’, and that ‘overreactions or even miltarized responses’ could become a common occurrence.

Indeed, influential American defence analyst Michael Klare warned more than a decade ago that conflict over scarce resources like oil, water, timber and minerals would be the driving force behind most of the twenty-first century’s wars. Explaining his 2002 book Resource Wars to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Klare noted that much of the history of the Western Hemisphere has been defined by the pursuit of valuable resources, but that “we are in a qualitatively different situation today”. Klare argues that population growth, increasing consumption patterns, and globalisation have combined to put unprecedented pressures on the earth’s resources, “producing a collision between rising demand and limited supply that has many consequences”.

He continues: “I also fear that some of this competition will lead to violent conflict in some cases. I see evidence of the securitisation of resource issues – the articulation of the view that certain resources are vital to national security of the states involved and, therefore, something that legitimately can be fought over… It is this logic of the securitisation of resource issues that worries me most; not scarcity per se, but the government view that territorial disputes over resources can be solved by force when other means don’t succeed.”

We’ve already seen this in practice, of course: the US, for instance, has long held that the free flow of petroleum is essential to national security – a view enshrined in the Carter Doctrine of 1980, and a stance that has had devastating consequences in the Middle East.

But the US isn’t alone, as countless conflicts attest. Klare highlights specifically the instance of Bougainville, a now-autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, which was highly disputed in the 1990s. “Bougainville [has] the largest copper mine in the world. It was the sole source of income for the Papua New Guinea government, and so they were prepared to hire a mercenary army to invade and reconquer the island”, Klare summarises.

Klare argues that only international collaboration in the development of new technologies, alternative sources of material and resource efficiency can avert such conflicts. More than 10 years on from his initial plea, we’re only just starting to take the issue seriously and act to address the concomitant threats. With industrialisation spreading throughout the world and billions more people on the way, our method of collaboratively counteracting supply risks needs now to outpace our ever-escalating resource use.