Natural Heritage
Everyone’s, or no one’s?
Who owns the clouds, the rain, the air we breathe, the animals, the sea, the forests, the water? They belong to each of us: our common goods, our shared heritage—the natural resources that make all life possible, including human life.
Natural heritage—everything that makes life on Earth possible and enables us humans to live well and stay healthy—consists of all the planet’s resources: air, water, and soil; minerals and rocks; ecosystems, organisms, and genes. Knowing and defending the planet’s natural heritage—finite, not inexhaustible—means defending the future.
This section examines other natural resources which, together with the Global Ocean, sustain life on Earth. They are grouped into the following broad themes: biodiversity, air, fresh water, soil, environments, and marine geodiversity. Although these topics cut across—and are partly developed within—various sections of MOA, we present them here again to highlight additional facets.
The Environment as a Global Resource
The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, was the first to place priority on the environment and its management. The resulting Declaration brought to the forefront the relationship between development, economic growth, renewability, and the limits of natural resources in both industrialised and developing countries. Several principles in the Stockholm Declaration remain valid—and, unfortunately, often disregarded—today.
Principle 2: The natural resources of the Earth—including air, water, soil, flora and fauna, and representative samples of natural ecosystems—must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future generations through careful planning or management, as appropriate.
Principle 3: The Earth’s capacity to produce vital renewable resources must be maintained and, wherever possible, restored or enhanced.
Principle 5: The Earth’s non-renewable resources must be used in such a way as to guard against the danger of their future exhaustion and to ensure that the benefits derived from their use are shared by all humankind.
The Stockholm Conference led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
Renewable, non-renewable
The term “natural resource” refers to water, the air we breathe, raw materials from the soil and subsoil, and the energy we draw from the Sun, the Earth itself, biomass, and fossil fuels. Natural resources are generally classified as renewable or non-renewable, depending on whether the geological processes that produced them can replenish them at rates comparable to those at which they are consumed.
