Introduction

The research found that Humanity’s demand on natural resources is increasingly exceeding Earth’s biological rate of regeneration, with an increasing deterioration in environmental conditions such as greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, ocean acidification and groundwater depletion. Due to this trend, the capacity of ecosystems to renew biomass, ‘biocapacity,’ is becoming the material bottleneck for the human economy. The report highlights that economic development theory and practice continue to overlook the importance of natural resources, most notably the biological kind.

Exposure to biological resource constraints

The research analysed the unequal exposure of national economies to biocapacity constraints and found that a growing number of people live in countries with both biocapacity deficits and below-average income. 72% of humanity lived in such countries by 2017, and this trend not only erodes their possibilities for maintaining progress but also eliminates their chances for eradicating poverty, a situation dubbed the ‘ecological poverty trap’. The report emphasises that biological resource security is a far more influential factor contributing to lasting development success than most economic development theories and practices would suggest.

Biological resource security

The report defines ‘biological resource security’ as the ability of a population to secure access to their current level of biological resource demand, or a higher one if the current level does not allow them to meet their material needs. To secure their metabolism, people compete with other living things for the biological productivity of ecosystems, which encompasses basic life-support functions, including food, clean water, waste absorption and shelter. The research examines how biological resource scarcity can limit economic development as those resources are under increasing threat.

Recommendations

The report recommends that overlooking resource conditions in efforts to reduce and eventually eradicate poverty may have been acceptable or even reasonable in the past when resource constraints did not limit factors. However, this assumption no longer holds. The research indicates that ignoring the importance of enhancing resource security of a population undermines their development prospects.

Conclusion

The report concludes that as long as biological capital depletion remains an available option for powering economies, economic impacts of overshoot will still occur. However, in an era where living off the depletion of biological capital is no longer an option, humanity’s physical metabolism must stem entirely from Earth’s biological regeneration. Economic development strategies promoted by key international institutions or leading development economics textbooks are too silent on this question. Overlooking biological resource constraints can lead to nations having insufficient resources within their territory, in addition to not having the financial advantage to compensate for this resource deficit through their purchasing power.

The report emphasises the need to focus on conservation, restoration, and regenerative use to enhance lasting biocapacity, with solutions grouped into five overlapping outcome categories. The report underscores the importance of nations enhancing their biological resource security to create development prospects for their people and avoid the ‘ecological poverty trap’.