This week marks a historic milestone for the United Nations as world leaders gather in New York to sign off on three key documents: The Pact for the Future, The Global Digital Compact and the Declaration on Future Generations. There are fifty-six action items in these documents. The lofty aspirations miss a core issue of how the material-energy nexus for our planet’s resources needs to be harnessed to achieve these actions. While energy is mentioned 15 times in the document with goals of mitigating “energy poverty” and aspirations for “energy for all,” there is not a single mention of materials or minerals needed for delivering on these aspirations. Yet again world leaders keep missing opportunities to have a truly systems approach to solving global problems which recognize natural resource constraints.
Fifteen years ago, in my book Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, I considered the following question: If we were to come up with a simple algorithm for considering global challenges, what would it be? While it would be sheer hubris for any summit to formulate solutions to the world’s myriad problems, we can have more substantive points of intervention. In 2009, I suggested that a very general five-point development action plan that embraces the primacy of natural resources might look something like the following:
1. Give material and energy conservation measures priority within existing frames of reference by mandating responsible ecological design that does not disparage consumption of energy and resources but makes it more efficient and sensitive of rebound effects.
2. Identify proximate challenges to human development by linking livelihood creation to particular material and energy supply chains – leading to a “sustainable livelihood assessment” for different products.
3. Reconfigure environmental policy toward materials management that seeks to consider different scenarios of lifestyles, based on resource constraints rather than one ideal outcome.
4. Harness nonrenewable minerals and materials with a clear control on the temporal scale of the operations and the speed and scale of ecological restoration versus extraction.
5. Invigorate scientific creativity through a greater emphasis on environmental education that is premised on retrieving human-created materials from the environment and synthesis of essential materials such as fuels through biochemical innovation.
This simple five-point strategy is still relevant today as minerals and energy are the ultimate primary resource. The U.N. Secretary General clearly recognizes the salience of critical minerals for the green transition as he commissioned a special panel ahead of the Summit for the Future. The report of this panel was issued on September 11, 2024, but even in this report the actionable items are oblique and bureaucratic with calls for new funding mechanisms and councils but no tangible policy deliverables. There are calls for a “High Level Advisory Group” with the enticing but amorphous acronym ‘Accelerating Critical Energy Transition Minerals Value Addition Towards Equity’ (ACTIVATE). Yet, the core issue of reducing geopolitical tensions around minerals and energy infrastructure are skirted around and not addressed.
The Summit for the Future is meant to consider the world’s sustainable development agenda beyond 2030 when there is donor fatigue with even the use of the word “sustainability.” It is high time that the United Nations and other international organizations go back to the basics of what natural resources are needed to deliver development in all its various forms.
