Natural resources around the world

Everything we use — every car, computer, phone, sandwich, and glass of water — starts with a natural resource. A natural resource is anything found in nature that people can use: minerals from the ground, water from a river, sunlight from the sky, soil for crops, fish from the sea. Earth is generous, but it is not generous in the same way everywhere. Resources are unevenly distributed, and that fact has shaped politics, trade, and conflict for thousands of years.

Renewable vs nonrenewable

Some resources renew themselves naturally on a human timescale and are called renewable. Solar energy, wind, hydropower, geothermal heat, freshwater (if used carefully), and well-managed forests and fisheries all renew. Other resources took millions of years to form and cannot be replaced on any timescale we can wait for. These are nonrenewable — coal, oil, natural gas, and most minerals fall into this group. Once we burn or use them, they are gone.

Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels — oil, coal, and natural gas — power most of modern civilization. They formed over hundreds of millions of years from buried plants and tiny sea creatures squeezed and heated underground. The world's biggest oil producers are Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, Russia, and the United States. The biggest coal producers are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Australia. Because fossil fuels are nonrenewable and burning them releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the world is now slowly shifting toward renewable energy.

Freshwater

Only about 3% of all water on Earth is fresh, and most of THAT is locked in glaciers and deep groundwater. Freshwater is unevenly distributed too: countries like Brazil, Canada, and Russia hold huge amounts of it, while much of North Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia is arid. Water scarcity is becoming one of the most serious resource problems of the 21st century, especially in dry regions whose populations are still growing.

Arable land and food

Only about 10% of Earth's land surface is "arable" — flat enough, with fertile soil and enough water to grow crops. Most of the rest is desert, mountain, ice, or thin tundra soil. Big farming powerhouses include the United States, China, India, Brazil, and the European Union. Protecting arable land from urban sprawl, soil erosion, and climate change is a major challenge for feeding 8 billion people.

Minerals — the new resource race

Modern technology runs on minerals most people have never heard of. Lithium (mostly mined in Australia, Chile, and China) powers the batteries in phones and electric cars. Copper (Chile, Peru, China) is essential for every electrical wire and motor. Gold, iron ore, bauxite (for aluminum), and rare earth elements are mined where geology happens to have concentrated them — which means a small number of countries hold huge influence over the rest of the world's industries.

Why distribution matters

Because no country has all the resources it needs, countries trade — and sometimes fight — over them. Conservation matters most for nonrenewable resources: every barrel of oil burned today is one that future generations will not have. Even renewable resources need careful stewardship: a forest cut down faster than it can grow back becomes a permanent loss, and a fishery overfished collapses for decades. Understanding where Earth's resources are, and using them wisely, is one of the central jobs of the 21st-century world.