Resource Depletion

With the current state of consumption there is not enough time for every resource to restore itself. With this there are many issues. Firstly, resource depletion is the consumption of a resource faster than it can be replenished.

Now, these resources are commonly divided between renewable resources and non-renewable resources. Using either of them beyond their rate of replacement is considered to be resource depletion. The value of a resource is a direct result of its availability in nature and cost of extracting the resource; the more a resource is depleted the more the value of the resource increases.

There are several types of resource depletion. The most known are the aquifer depletion, deforestation, mining for fossil fuels and minerals, pollution of contamination of resources, slash-and-burn agricultural practices, soil erosion, and overconsumption, and the excessive or unnecessary use of resources. This is also commonly in reference to farming, fishing, mining, water usage, and consumption of fossil fuels (the depletion of wildlife populations is called defaunation).

Currently there is an effort to offset the depletion of resources where theorists have come up with the concept of depletion accounting, better known as “green accounting”. This aims to account for nature’s value on an equal footing with the market economy. Green accounting uses data available to them which is provided from counties to estimate the adjustments needed due to their use and depletion of the natural capital, natural resources such as mineral deposits or timber stocks. Depletion accounting factors in several different influences such as the number of years until resource exhaustion, the cost of resource extraction and the demand of the resource. These industries make up a large part of the economic activity in developing countries which leads to higher levels of resource depletion and environmental degradation in developing countries. The depletion accounting system also seeks to measure the social value of natural resources and ecosystems.

Environmentalists are mainly interested in depletion accounting as a way to track the use of natural resources over time, hold governments accountable, or to compare their environmental conditions to those of another country. They want to measure resource depletion to understand how financially reliant countries or corporations are on non-renewable resources;,whether this use can be sustained, and the financial drawback of switching to renewable resources in light of the depleting resources.

This is complex to implement as nature is not as quantifiable as cars, houses, or bread. The appropriate units of natural resources must be established so that natural resources can be viable in the market economy. The main issues are determining a suitable unit of account, deciding how to deal with the “collective” nature of a complete ecosystem, delineating the borderline of the ecosystem, and defining the extent of possible duplication when the resource interacts in more than one ecosystem. Globally, environmental economics has not been able to provide a consensus of measurement units of nature’s services.