Governance of the World’s Mineral Resources Beyond the Foreseeable Future

About this book

Governance of the World's Mineral Resources: Beyond the Foreseeable Future provides in-depth information on the geological scarcity of mineral resources. The book demonstrates the urgent need to implement sustainable utilization of mineral resources, in order to ensure that these resources will be sufficiently available for future generations too. The availability of resources, especially for modern technologies, is an increasingly important issue. Some key mineral resources are so geologically scarce that their availability for future generations may not only become substantially less but also much less affordable than for the current generation unless timely measures are taken. This book provides detailed data and calculations on the availability of mineral resources. The book elaborates on whether and how it is possible to keep providing sufficient mineral resources to a growing world population, and for how long. The book details also how and for how much time it will be possible for all countries, worldwide, to achieve and maintain service delivery of raw materials to their population at levels equivalent to those in developed countries in 2020. Governance of the World's Mineral Resources: Beyond the Foreseeable Future is, therefore, an important source of knowledge for postgraduates, academics and researchers in the fields of environmental science, sustainability, and geology, as well as anyone in the field of mining and economics who need to account for sustainable provision of mineral resources.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Availability of Mineral Resources in the Earth’s Crust
3. Limits to the Extractability of Mineral Resources
4. Critical Raw Materials
5. Mineral Resources Ethics
6. The Price Mechanism
7. Thirteen Scarce Resources Analyzed
8. Mineral Resources Governance
9. Setting up an International Agreement
10. Epilogue
11. Glossary
12. List of Abbreviations

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Biography

Theo Henckens obtained his Master’s degree in Chemical Technology at Eindhoven Technical University, The Netherlands, in 1972. After his study, Theo Henckens specialized in the field of environmental protection and water management in different functions in the private sector and for the Dutch government. From 1990 on, Theo Henckens was the leader of a large number of internationally financed projects in the field of water and environment. After his retirement in 2011, Theo Henckens joined the Copernicus Institute of Utrecht University, The Netherlands, where he then obtained a PhD on the subject of “Managing raw materials scarcity” in 2016. Between 2014 and 2020, Theo Henckens was the lead author of a number of studies published in peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject of the geological scarcity of mineral resources.