The competition over how to use finite resources is reaching unprecedented levels, launching a new race for space to provide for all of humanity’s needs. Strategic assets have been sources of conflict since the dawn of time, but new pressures are surfacing as climate change degrades arable lands and ocean health, as demand surges for new minerals and resources for the green transition, and as technological innovation sets the stage for science fiction-like pursuits of key resources.

Land-use conflicts are intensifying in every world region – particularly (but not exclusively) in the Global South. Africa faces conflicts about how to protect natural areas, mine for rare earths, and deal with drought. Brazil passed a new law that opens new territories to farming and mining, potentially undercutting pledges to protect forests and the rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Sámi in Sweden face threats to their homelands and way of life from climate change, wind farms, and mining of “green” minerals. China is experiencing rapid urban and industrial growth that encroaches on farms and ecological areas. Environmental protests in Panama contributed to the closure of one of the world’s largest copper mines at the same time that demand for copper needed for solar and wind power exceeds supplies.

At the same time, technological advances are creating resource competition in new frontiers. In a move characterized as “the biggest land grab in history”, prospectors are poised to mine the world’s sea beds, seeking cobalt, manganese, nickel, and rare earth elements that are components of green technologies.

The next possible frontier? The moon. Countries and private entrepreneurs are competing in a new race in the cosmos, incentivized in part by the prospect of securing Helium-3 for nuclear power, mining rare earths minerals for renewables and electronics, achieving commercial advantage, and demonstrating technological prowess.

Against this backdrop of growing competition for resources, new evidence suggests that “Earth system boundaries” are about to be reached, posing a risk to “the stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being”. The global population of more than 8 billion people, on its way to 9 billion by midcentury, is ratcheting up pressure on the planet struggling to meet the needs of everyone for everything everywhere. Indeed, the Global Footprint Network estimates that maintaining current levels of resource consumption would require 1.7 earths.

Land under pressure  

The need to do it all is creating high-stakes trade-offs. Interests of local, national and international authorities and the private sector both intertwine and conflict. Decisions and actions made in one place (Exhibit A: the Amazon rainforest) could have profound effects on us all. Afforestation aimed at climate mitigation may in turn drive up food prices and leave tens of millions more people at risk of hunger.

By 2050, an area of land nearly twice the size of India will need to be converted to agriculture by 2050 to feed the growing population, and an area the size of the continental US will be required to meet the world’s growing demand for wood, according to projections by the World Resources Institute. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted that humanity needs to protect and restore land to fight climate change, prevent biodiversity loss, and sustain other benefits of the ecosystem that people depend upon. As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said at COP28, even phasing out all fossil fuels will not be enough to keep global heating to 1.5C; nature must also be protected to serve as carbon sinks.

Competing interests are exacerbating inequalities. In Iraq, for example, extreme drought is increasingly destroying crops and displacing farmers and stoking conflict. Meanwhile, demand is growing for meat, energy and other resource-intensive trappings of privileged lifestyles of the world’s wealthiest populations. Corporations are taking advantage of the unregulated carbon market, paying someone somewhere to plant or save a tree, say, to offset their emissions – with many practices merely exercises in greenwashing, rife with corruption, land grabs and human rights abuses.

“To put it bluntly”, a recent Chatham House report soberly concluded, “without significant reforms governments will be forced into a series of untenable choices: between feeding people, meeting climate targets and preserving nature; between economic prosperity today and safeguarding populations’ well-being tomorrow; and between asserting national resource security agendas and managing foreign relations to avoid conflict.”

Oceans under pressure

The situation is strikingly similar in the world’s oceans, whose resources no longer seem limitless. The Earth’s biggest carbon sink faces unprecedented pressures from human demands that have “exploded” in the last 30 years. The list of issues is long: overfishing; pollution from agricultural runoff, fuels, and plastics; the presence of oil drilling and wind turbines; and the laying of submarine cables and pipelines. Taking the oceans’ vital signs reveals stress – with the oceans’ chemistry itself changing, powered by a “deadly trio”: acidification, oxygen loss and temperature rise.

Conflict is now emerging over the prospect of mining the ocean beds for resources in demand for the green transition. Just this month, Norway’s parliament backed deep-sea mining off its shores, despite controversy over its environmental risks. A global flashpoint is the Clarion-Clipperton, a vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico that has been described as “a modern El Dorado”, with lucrative nickel, cobalt and rare earth minerals in nodules lying on or in the ocean floor. The International Seabed Authority – whose mission is to regulate mining in “the Area”, the ocean beds that lie beyond national jurisdictions and comprise over half of the world’s sea beds – has entered into agreements with contractors. But concerns are growing over its dual role as “mining regulator and custodian of the seabed environment” and its decision-making processes. Calls have surfaced for a moratorium on such exploration until issues have been resolved, particularly in light of the recent discovery of some 5000 new species in that region’s deep waters.

As pressures on the ocean accumulate, interest is growing in regenerative ocean farming to help ease food security, stave off coastal erosion, clean up pollution, and absorb carbon. The World Bank has set up a Blue Economy Development Framework to aim to tap innovations and address risks. At the same time, investments to address key issues must rise exponentially. At present, the least-funded Sustainable Development Goal is Number 14, calling for the protection of life below water.

The Carnegie Foundation for International Peace sums up the situation succinctly: “The world needs a new Blue Deal.”

Beyond Earth

Scientific research made possible by satellites in space that can document the environmental changes on the planet has been essential for recording and tracking the impacts of climate change. Our eyes in space allow us to see changes in glaciers, in land-use patterns, in the ozone hole.

Now a new kind of space race is on – fuelled by technological change, ambitions of more countries and more private enterprises, and by the idea that the finite resources of Earth can be amplified by resources from space.

A “lunar gold rush” may be on the horizon, with the prospectors taking first steps toward possibly mining the moon for water, Helium-3 (used in nuclear power) and rare earth minerals. The science fiction-like prospects have already generated international controversy. Indeed, some scientists have suggested space-based geoengineering approaches, such as using moondust to cool the planet. The UN is already grappling with international space governance to “propel innovation and mitigate risks”, including coordinating space traffic and dealing with space debris. Starlink alone has more than 4,500 satellites – increasingly controversial because its power (for internet access in remote areas, and for government war intelligence) is concentrated largely in the hands of one man: Elon Musk.

It is hard to know how this race among space farers in the heavens will affect the one on land and in the seas. Fifty-five years have passed since the camera of astronaut William Anders captured “Earthrise”, considered to be “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”. That image – of a piece of a blue marble, black space and grey lunar landscape – gave the world an indelible new perspective. As Anders observed half a century later, “We set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.”