Water, energy and land insecurity in global supply chains

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102158Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Global assessment of water, energy and land insecurity in 189 countries.

  • Resource insecurity is observed in both individual countries and globally.

  • Countries are more exposed to resource insecurity beyond their borders.

  • Interventions are needed at source to reduce resource insecurity.

  • Diversifying imports unlikely to de-risk supply chains due to widespread trade risks.

Abstract

National consumption of goods and services is met by domestic production and international trade. As a result, countries and sectors exert pressure on natural resources both within and beyond their national borders. Where this resource demand is imposed matters to the effective management of global resource insecurity. Although instructive, the ‘resource footprint’ of a country or sector – a common yardstick to assess the sustainability of consumption – does not distinguish its origin of production and associated resource risk. As a result, the source and severity of global resource insecurity remains poorly understood. To understand how resource use connects different actors within the global economy, the water, energy and land footprints of 189 countries and 14838 country sectors are analysed by source (domestic, macro-regional and remote) and risk (high, medium and low). Linking national consumption to source reveals countries and sectors are highly exposed, directly (via domestic production) and indirectly (via imports), to over-exploited, insecure, and degraded water, energy, and land resources. However, countries and sectors exhibit greater exposure to resource risks via international trade (80–90%), mainly from remote production sources. Within this context, countries and sectors share the same sources of resource supply and risk, highlighting an opportunity to manage their resource security by intervening in upstream global supply chains. Nevertheless, our findings also invite critical reflection on whether globalisation is compatible with managing risks countries face and drive across the global water-energy-land system.

Introduction

A minimum condition of sustainable development is that demand for goods and services is met without compromising the resource base on which they depend (Hickel and Kallis, 2019). However, both in individual countries, and globally, such a condition has not been met (Erb et al., 2012, Krausmann et al., 2018, Steffen et al., 2015). Instead, development has begun to overstep the limited regenerative and assimilative capacities of the biosphere (O’Neill et al., 2018). This is observable for three critical resources which underpin development: water (Gleick and Heberger, 2014), energy (Seppelt et al., 2014), and land (IPBES, 2018). The impact of human activity across the Water–Energy–Land (WEL) system is unprecedented within history (Steffen et al., 2015). Major water basins have been over-exploited (Wang and Zimmerman, 2016), some at fifty times their replenishment rate (Tuninetti et al., 2019), resulting in an estimated four billion people affected by severe water scarcity (Mekonnen and Hoekstra, 2016). Global energy demand, primarily for fossil fuel resources, has brought humanity dangerously close to tipping points in the climate system whilst also curtailing national security (IPCC, 2014, Andrews-Speed et al., 2012). Whilst over three-quarters of potentially productive land has been degraded (IPBES, 2018), driving food insecurity and collapse of ecosystems (Chaudhary and Kastner, 2016, Wilting et al., 2017, FAO, 2011). The factors contributing towards this trilemma – economic development, population growth and technological change – are abundantly clear. However, the exact pathways of water, energy and land resource insecurity have become increasingly complex to unpick, sort, and reconcile with meaningful policy interventions.

In recent decades, resource pressures have shifted from local to global production and consumption contexts (Giampietro, 2014). Consequently, local resource problems related to water stress (Allan, 2003, Dalin et al., 2017, Lenzen et al., 2013a, Vörösmarty et al., 2015), energy demand (Davis and Caldeira, 2010, Kander et al., 2015, Zhang et al., 2017) and land degradation (Bruckner et al., 2015, Chen and Han, 2015, Godar et al., 2015), are increasingly determined by consumptive decisions made beyond national borders. This can be observed in the rise of trade in agriculture and livestock products (MacDonald et al., 2015, Taherzadeh and Caro, 2019, Zanten et al., 2016), fossil fuels (Davis and Caldeira, 2010), manufactured goods (Zhang et al., 2017), and services (Victor and Rosenbluth, 2007).

The overall resource burden of human activity has also grown dramatically. During the 20th century, global population quadrupled and global economic output grew more than 20-fold (Maddison, 2001). This expansion saw the extraction of construction materials grow by a factor of 34, ores and minerals by a factor of 27, fossil fuels by a factor of 12, and biomass by a factor of 3.6 (Krausmann et al., 2009). Moreover, the number of competing demands for water, energy and land resources have grown, in step with the increasing diversity of goods and services consumed within society. New demands on natural resources, from the built environment, transport sector, and consumer goods, have accompanied the shift of societies from agrarian to industrial regimes (Krausmann et al., 2016). These many pathways of water, energy and land use have also become fragmented along supply chains owing to the outsourcing and sub-contracting of production (Los et al., 2015).

Several methods of analysis have emerged to better characterise the increasingly complex and globalised pathways of human influence across the WEL system. Early life-cycle analysis studies of product supply chains showed how the extraction and use of natural resources is highly interconnected within complex networks of sectoral interactions and feedbacks (Ayres et al., 1998, Alting and Jøgensen, 1993, Hendrickson et al., 1998). Economy-wide environmental footprinting later illustrated the macro-economic nature of these relationships which rendered country and sector resource dependencies global in scope (Lenzen, 2008, Suh et al., 2004, Bringezu et al., 2003). Within this context, several studies have highlighted how resource-related risks, via international trade, are transmitted between both developed and developing countries (Kumar and Singh, 2005, Guan and Hubacek, 2007, Allan, 2010). The 2008 global food crisis exemplified the tight embrace between these forces (Headey, 2011). More recently, practical developments in data availability have enabled the development of several environmental indicators for the purpose of multiple-stressor assessment of country and sector consumption (cf Galli et al., 2012, Fang et al., 2014, O’Neill et al., 2018, Wood et al., 2018). Better integration of risks and planetary boundaries into environmental footprinting has helped to identify key drivers of resource insecurity (Lenzen et al., 2013a, O’Neill et al., 2018, Fang et al., 2015b, Fang et al., 2015a, Fang et al., 2014, Dao et al., 2018, Li et al., 2019). However, due to the limited spatial and sectoral scope of risk-based environmental footprinting, systemic drivers of resource insecurity in the world economy remain poorly understood.

Case studies have served as the dominant approach to assess source across the water–energy–land (WEL) system. However, boundaries for such analysis are usually established without a foundational understanding of major resource origins and risks across the WEL system which are global and cross-sectoral in scope. Consequently, policy priorities drawn from resource security assessment might simply be an artefact of the partial scope of analysis rather than a reflection of systemic risks to natural resource systems and the activities which they support (Srivastava and Lyla, 2014). As a result, many have called for resource use analysis to be broadened, sectorally and spatially, to encompass the totality of global water, energy and land use (Vivanco et al., 2018, Taherzadeh, 2020, Wichelns, 2017, Hoff and Gerten, 2015, Sušnik, 2018, Carmona-Moreno et al., 2019, Weitz et al., 2017, Johnson et al., 2019, Staupe-Delgado, 2019). Only with this systematic overview can priorities for management of natural resources be meaningfully compared.

Attempts to broaden the scope of integrated environmental impact assessment remain limited to global models of the food sector (FAO, 2015, Keskinen et al., 2016, Lacirignola et al., 2014, Sušnik, 2018), cross-sectoral analysis of single countries or regions (Owen et al., 2018, Peng et al., 2019, Duan and Chen, 2017, Tukker et al., 2016), or global, cross-sectoral models which capture total national and sectoral resource use but do not distinguish its associated risk (Vivanco et al., 2018, Bijl et al., 2018, White et al., 2018, Velázquez et al., 2010). Accordingly, there is a need for a flexible framework for resource use assessment which captures the major interactions and risks across the WEL system, and which is global and cross-sectoral in scope.

By developing a spatial and risk-weighted assessment of interactions between the world economy and global water-energy-land system, this study examines:

  • 1.

    the level of country and sector dependence on global water, energy and land resources;

  • 2.

    the severity and source of national and sectoral water, energy and land use and risk exposure; and

  • 3.

    implications of national boundary setting for resource security assessment

Insights from this analysis can inform resource security assessment in three main ways. First, by studying how resource use connects different actors within the global economy, this analysis identifies the appropriate unit of spatial analysis (national, macro-regional or global) for the integrated management of consumption pressures on water, energy and land resources. Second, by linking consumption to source, this analysis reveals the main sources of resource extraction and risk embodied in national and sectoral supply chains, which in turn helps to identify otherwise unforeseen hot-spots for policy focus (Green et al., 2016). Third, this analysis brings into sharper focus the implications of national-scale resource security assessment of countries and sectors by revealing the resource use and risk ignored by only focusing analysis within national borders. In addition to contributing towards the identification of future research and policy priorities in resource security assessment, this study furthers understanding of national and sectoral dependence on, and exposure to, over-exploited, insecure, and degraded water, energy, and land resources.

The study begins by discussing the state of resource use assessment in relation to spatial coverage and boundary setting. This is followed by a summary of the analytical framework and indicators used to distinguish the national self-sufficiency and global inter-dependency of countries and sectors in relation to water, energy and land resources. A complementary schema of resource risk is developed in order to evaluate the severity of water, energy and land use embodied in national and sectoral supply chains and the supra-national extent of these interactions. The insights from this analysis are reported at an aggregate scale to reflect on and respond to the need for a high-level understanding of the importance of different scales (national, macro-regional and global) at which resource use assessment may be undertaken. However, country case studies are used to illustrate noteworthy findings. A major challenge pertaining to the assessment of national resource insecurity concerns its variability within countries which can be larger than differences between whole countries. Whilst the lack of sub-national resource use and risk data prevents a meaningful analysis of national resource insecurity at such level, we down-scale the basic model used in this study to examine these effects and present a framework for further analysis as higher resolution data becomes available. The study concludes by discussing the relative importance of global-scale analysis to the study of the water-energy-land system in different contexts.

Section snippets

Methods and data

Boundaries of resource use analysis and governance should be informed by a comprehensive understanding of the total environmental burden of human activity as it emerges from analysis of the data. However, current resource use assessment sets these boundaries a priori, often truncating accounting of water, energy and land use both sectorally and spatially (Taherzadeh, 2020). This is exemplified most clearly in the conceptual and empirical scope of the water-energy-food nexus concept which has

Analysis

This section presents the decomposition of country and sector water, energy and land footprints by resource risk and spatial scale in 2015. Section 3.1 presents a resource footprint and risk profile of countries and sectors in relation to water, energy and land. Section 3.2 distinguishes the contribution of domestic and non-domestic resource use within this context. Section 3.3 examines the challenges and potential effects of incorporating sub-national resource use and risk data into this

Discussion

The production and consumption of goods and services link economic actors in complex and globalised supply chains. As a result, the environmental burden of countries and sectors is distributed across various production locations worldwide. Where this resource demand is imposed matters to the effective management of the water-energy-land (WEL) system. However, to date resource use studies have been truncated, spatially and sectorally, which prevents a systematic overview of resource pressures

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Oliver Taherzadeh: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Data curation, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Mike Bithell: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Keith Richards: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgment

This work was funded by the Cambridge Trust Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship and supported by the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, project no. 14200135. We greatly appreciate the constructive feed back of Professor Dabo Guan, Dr Pablo Salas, Dr Keiichiro Kanemoto and the three anonymous reviewers which helped to improve this article.

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