Why Resource Demand Is Rising: Four Interconnected Drivers

📈 Why Resource Demand Is Rising: Four Interconnected Drivers

Demand for food, water, and energy is increasing faster than in any previous century. There is not one single cause — four major forces interact and amplify each other.

1. Population Growth

In 1800, the global population was around 1 billion. In 1927, it reached 2 billion. It hit 8 billion in 2022 — just 12 years after reaching 7 billion — and is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 (UN medium projection). More people means more mouths to feed, more bodies needing water, and more households demanding energy. The fastest population growth is in the regions already most resource-stressed: Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to add 1.1 billion people by 2050 — a region already struggling to provide reliable food, water, and electricity for current populations.

2. Economic Development and Changing Diets

As countries develop economically — particularly China, India, Brazil, and Nigeria — rising incomes change what people consume. The most significant shift is from plant-based diets to meat-heavy diets. China's pork consumption grew by over 500% between 1980 and 2020. Producing 1 kg of beef requires approximately 10 times more land, 8 times more water, and significantly more energy than producing equivalent calories from grain or vegetables. As hundreds of millions of people join the global middle class and begin eating diets similar to those in the UK or USA, the resource demands of food systems multiply dramatically.

Economic development also drives car ownership, air travel, and manufactured goods — all highly energy-intensive. China's energy consumption increased by roughly 600% between 1990 and 2020 as its economy industrialised.

3. Urbanisation

In 2007, for the first time in history, more than half the world's population lived in cities. By 2050, the UN projects that 68% of humanity will be urban. Cities are resource-intensive environments: urban lifestyles require more energy per person than rural ones (lighting, heating and cooling buildings, transport, refrigeration); urban food systems involve more processing and packaging; and cities generate concentrated demands on water supply and sewage infrastructure.

Urbanisation in rapidly growing cities in the Global South — Lagos, Dhaka, Kinshasa, Karachi — also creates informal settlements where water and energy connections are absent or unreliable, creating a different kind of resource pressure: not too much demand, but inadequate infrastructure to deliver supply to those who need it.

4. Climate Change

Climate change is both increasing demand and reducing supply simultaneously — making it the most complex of the four drivers. On the demand side, rising temperatures increase the need for irrigation (crops wilt faster in heat), energy for cooling (air conditioning), and water purification (contamination rates rise with temperature). On the supply side, changing rainfall patterns are making droughts more frequent and prolonged in already-dry regions; glacial retreat is reducing the dry-season water supply for the 2 billion people who depend on glaciers (in the Himalayas, Andes, and Alps); and extreme weather events are disrupting food production worldwide.

The most dramatic recent illustration: the 2022 Pakistan floods — partly driven by Himalayan glacial melt accelerated by climate change — inundated one-third of the country's agricultural land, destroying crops, contaminating water supplies, and displacing 33 million people.