Scarcity-weighted global land and metal footprints

Resource scarcity poses an increasing threat to the supply security of modern economies. Some grand challenges ahead are the limits to agricultural expansion and the geologic scarcity of metals. To better understand the drivers behind land and metal depletion, footprint-type indicators are gaining importance. Such indicators, however, fail to differentiate between vastly different degrees of resource availability across regions. Using crop suitability areas and metal reserve base data, we calculate scarcity-weighted land and metal footprints for the major economies with the EXIOBASE global multi-regional input-output model. Scarcity-weighting causes a significant reordering of the global rankings of countries for both land and metal footprints. Land scarcity focuses mostly on cereals (54% from the total agricultural land used) and oil crops (15%), the former being notably affected by water scarcity issues in Asia and the Middle East. Metal scarcity focuses on copper ores (69%) and iron (-11%), the former being a globally scarce metal impacting multiple economies. The large impact of scarcity-weighting suggests that, while non-weighted resource footprints are a valid proxy of resource use, these are not always aligned with further implications of resource depletion and supply security. In this sense, scarcity weighting can offer an initial overview of those countries where analyses at finer scales may be more valuable. Our results also show that international trade is a major driver of land and metal depletion in some developing regions. This highlights the intersection of environmental justice and globalization, as the burden of resource depletion often falls into poorer regions which critically rely on exports.