Mineral Resources in 2023

Access to, and use of natural resources - land, water, oil and gas, minerals, or precious metals - have been in human history always closely related to the level of the wellbeing achieved, but also to stability, security, conflicts, wars. The whole history of the colonialisation of nature, was central also to fairness and equity. Lessons learned recently from the terrible war, pandemic, and the hottest summer since we started to record the temperature, are more than convincing to understand that changing our relationship with nature, is ultimately not only environmental, but also an economic, equality, security, and resilience imperative. This relationship is not stable, nor balanced, and it will be resolved either with collective wisdom and effort, or in a hard and very painful way, through conflicts, hunger, pandemics, migration…. This is the choice we have, and this is the real question behind our sustainability efforts. I hope that this will be well recognised also when designing the follow up of the EGD vision.

The future will be green … or there will be no future.

Ljubljana, September 2023

dr. Janez Potočnik
Co-Chair
UN International Resource Panel

Bilten (PDF, 15MB)