The world is running out of several critical resources at once, from the sand in concrete to the phosphorus in fertilizer to the helium that keeps MRI machines running. Some shortages are decades away, others are already causing disruptions, and a few are accelerating faster than most people realize. Here’s what’s actually getting scarce and why it matters.
Fresh Water
Water is the most immediate large-scale shortage. Under current consumption and pollution trends, demand for water will exceed supply by 40 percent in 2030, according to the UN International Resource Panel. Almost half the global population will face severe water stress within the next several years if nothing changes. That’s not a far-off projection. It’s the near future.
The problem isn’t that the planet has less water overall. It’s that usable freshwater is concentrated in the wrong places, polluted faster than it can recover, or pumped from underground aquifers that took thousands of years to fill. Governments are expected to spend $200 billion per year on upstream water supply to keep up with demand, roughly five times the historical average of $40 to $45 billion. Agriculture alone accounts for about 70 percent of global freshwater use, which means water scarcity is inseparable from food security.
Phosphorus for Fertilizer
Every crop you eat depends on phosphorus. It’s one of three essential nutrients (alongside nitrogen and potassium) that farmers apply to fields to maintain yields. Unlike nitrogen, which can be pulled from the atmosphere, phosphorus comes from mining phosphate rock, and there is no substitute. Current global reserves could be exhausted in 50 to 100 years.
The peak of global phosphate rock production is predicted to arrive around 2030. After that point, production won’t necessarily stop, but the remaining reserves will be lower quality and more expensive to extract, process, and ship. The fertilizer industry already acknowledges this trend. Meanwhile, global demand for crops will keep climbing as the population grows, meaning we’ll need more phosphorus fertilizer at exactly the time it’s becoming harder to produce. Three countries (Morocco, China, and the United States) control the vast majority of known reserves, adding a geopolitical layer to the problem. Recycling phosphorus from wastewater and animal manure is technically possible but still far from widespread.
Sand and Gravel
Sand sounds like the last thing we’d run out of, but the world consumes over 40 billion tons of sand and gravel each year. It’s the most extracted natural resource on Earth after water. Concrete, asphalt, glass, and electronics all require it, and the construction boom in rapidly urbanizing countries has pushed demand to levels that natural deposits can’t sustain.
Not just any sand works. Desert sand, despite its abundance, is too smooth and rounded for concrete. Construction needs angular, river-sourced or marine sand, where the grains lock together for structural strength. Sand fills voids and improves workability in concrete, while gravel provides bulk and load-bearing capacity. In 2018, global aggregate production totaled roughly 33.7 billion tons, with about 63 percent sourced from crushed rock. River and lake sand mining is now so intense in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa that it’s destroying riverbeds, collapsing banks, and wiping out aquatic ecosystems. Some countries have banned sand exports entirely.
Helium
Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe but remarkably scarce on Earth. Once released into the atmosphere, it’s light enough to escape the planet’s gravity entirely. We can’t manufacture it. Nearly all commercial helium comes from natural gas extraction, and supply disruptions have already forced research labs to shut down.
The most critical use isn’t party balloons. Every MRI machine requires about 2,000 liters of liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets to operating temperature. Particle accelerators, quantum computing equipment, and nuclear magnetic resonance devices used in drug development all depend on it too. In early 2022, maintenance shutdowns at gas production facilities in the U.S. and Qatar, combined with fires at a Russian facility, created a global squeeze. Geopolitical tensions, shipping delays, and supply chain problems compounded the shortage, and some academic research labs were forced to temporarily close. Recycling helium within MRI systems is improving, but the overall supply remains fragile.
Medical Isotopes
Most people have never heard of medical isotopes, but they’re essential for millions of diagnostic scans and cancer treatments every year. The majority of these isotopes are produced in just six nuclear reactors in Europe, and nearly all of those reactors are old. With the exception of one, they’re approaching the end of their operational lives and will eventually shut down.
The supply chain is already precarious. If one large reactor or one of the specialized processing laboratories goes offline unexpectedly, the remaining facilities cannot pick up the slack. That means delays in both diagnostic imaging and cancer therapy on a global scale. New reactor projects and alternative production methods are in development, but the window between aging facilities closing and replacements coming online is a real vulnerability.
Flying Insects
This one isn’t a mineral or a commodity, but it may be the most consequential. A landmark study tracking flying insect populations in protected nature reserves across Germany found a 76 percent decline in total flying insect biomass over 27 years. In midsummer, the drop was 82 percent. These weren’t farmlands or cities. They were protected areas, which makes the finding especially alarming.
Insects pollinate roughly 75 percent of the world’s food crops and form the base of food webs that birds, fish, and mammals depend on. Losing them triggers cascading effects through entire ecosystems. The causes are a combination of habitat loss, pesticide use, light pollution, and climate change. Because insect populations were rarely monitored historically, the true scale of the decline went unrecognized for decades. Species that feed on insects, from swallows to bats, are declining in parallel.
Topsoil
You may have seen the claim that the world has only 60 harvests left. The reality is more nuanced but still concerning. That figure comes from a simple calculation: if topsoil thins by about half a centimeter per year, it would take 60 years to lose 30 centimeters, which is roughly the depth of productive agricultural soil. A closer analysis found that more than 90 percent of conventionally managed soils have a lifespan greater than 60 years, with a median of 491 years for soils that are actively thinning.
That longer timeline is reassuring at first glance, but it masks enormous regional variation. Some of the world’s most productive farmland is losing soil far faster than the median, particularly in areas with intensive tillage, monoculture cropping, and heavy rainfall. Topsoil takes centuries to form naturally. Once it’s gone, the land effectively stops producing food without massive inputs of fertilizer, which circles back to the phosphorus problem. Soil degradation is already reducing yields in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the American Midwest.
Effective Antibiotics
The world isn’t running out of antibiotics in a physical sense. It’s running out of antibiotics that work. Bacteria evolve resistance to the drugs designed to kill them, and the pipeline of new antibiotic classes has nearly dried up. Most major pharmaceutical companies have exited antibiotic research because the economics don’t favor it: a successful antibiotic is used sparingly (to slow resistance), which means low revenue compared to drugs taken daily for chronic conditions.
Antimicrobial resistance already kills well over a million people per year globally, and that number is projected to climb steeply in the coming decades. Routine surgeries, organ transplants, and cancer chemotherapy all rely on effective antibiotics to prevent infection. Without them, modern medicine loses one of its foundational safety nets. The problem is compounded by overuse in livestock farming, where antibiotics are often given to healthy animals to promote growth, accelerating the evolution of resistant bacteria that can spread to humans.