ABSTRACT

The term 'renewable resource' has been used extremely widely in the literature, becoming almost a catch-all expression to encompass the highly diverse 'products' of physical environmental systems which are not classified as mineral stocks. The central characteristic of renewable resources is that they are thought to be capable of natural regeneration into useful 'products' within a timespan relevant to man. Scarcity is first used here in a restricted sense to refer to the situation where supplies of essential flow resources are insufficient to enable human beings to survive at 'baseline' standards of living. These types of scarcity are created by a complex of economic, social, demographic, institutional and political conditions, and they are not amenable to simple solution. For many years now scientists have argued that human activity has reduced biological diversity and changed the global energy budget and critical bio-geochemical cycles.