ABSTRACT
All human activity involves the use of natural resources or in some way affects these resources. Waste ful use of resources leads to scarcity and to want, either for the user or for others. Want can result in tension, conflict or even war. Industrialization, modernization and increasing wealth have created patterns of resource consumption among a rapidly growing segment of the world’s population that are unsustainable. Certainly 7 to 9 billion people cannot consume material resources at the rate that the top 1 billion do now. In all developed societies, consumption far exceeds basic needs, and waste has become endemic. Although many observers considered the arguments presented more than forty years ago in Limits to Growth premature or even misguided, it is now evident that humanity faces resource challenges on many fronts – and today’s governance institutions are inadequate to tackle them successfully. The heightened intensity and complexity of these challenges arises not just from growing wealth and consumption but also from a range of economic, political and technological changes over recent decades that render many of the preexisting governance institutions impotent.
