Natural resources: control, scarcity and geopolitics

In 2010, Japan imported phones, cars and wind turbines. It also came close to losing access to the one material without which none of those products exist: rare earths. China, which then controlled 97% of global production, cut its exports in the midst of a territorial dispute over the Senkaku Islands. For weeks, Japanese manufacturers contemplated halting production lines. Rare earth prices doubled within months.

It was not an energy crisis in the conventional sense, nor a war, nor a financial shock. It was an invisible dependency on seventeen metals whose names most business leaders and policymakers could not even pronounce.

Every time you charge a phone, turn on a tap, board a plane, or switch on a light, you draw on natural resources. These are not geological abstractions: they are the material foundations of every economy, every food system, and every foreign policy. Their prices spike, their reserves concentrate, and their control is negotiated through power dynamics as often as through markets.

This Fundamental gives you the framework to read those dynamics: why certain materials have become matters of national security, why seemingly abundant resources are already under strain, and how the energy transition will redraw global power relationships over the coming decades.

1. What is a natural resource?

A relative definition

A natural resource is anything nature makes available that human societies can put to use: minerals, water, forests, fertile soil, solar and wind energy, flora and fauna. The definition sounds clear enough. In practice, it is deeply relative.

Oil seeped from the ground for millennia before ancient civilisations came to regard it as a nuisance. It only became the world’s most strategic resource with the invention of the internal combustion engine in the nineteenth century. Lithium, a metal chemists have known since 1817, remained a laboratory curiosity until the rechargeable battery market exploded. A resource only exists as such if the technology to extract it and a market to value it both exist.

Renewable or non-renewable?

• Non-renewable resources form over geological timescales. Once extracted, they cannot be replenished on any human timeline: oil, gas, coal, lithium, cobalt, phosphate.
• Renewable resources regenerate naturally, provided exploitation rates do not exceed regeneration rates: fresh water, forests, arable land, solar and wind energy. Their renewal is not guaranteed under excessive human pressure.

For non-renewables, the risk is gradual, irreversible depletion. For renewables, it is degradation through overexploitation. Two different dynamics; two different policy responses required.