Buy Hard: Climate, Hazards, and Natural Resources across Geopolitical fault lines

At a time when climate complexities, exposure to concomitant natural hazards, accruing physical vulnerabilities across the natural and built environments, and a whirlwind evolution of energy sources all pierce through layered societal fragilities and fraught global equilibria, identifying shared interests can appear a Herculean exercise. This is underscored by unexpected geopolitical tensions and strategic conundrums, bridging human safety and security and raising major questions about the present and future of the Earth system. Social and political polarisations, wavering international policies, and ageing demographics are not helpful.

Also, not only can the circuitous evolutions across the availability and location of natural resources, for today and tomorrow, appear both too “fast” and too “slow” (to either global citizens and/or involved stakeholders), but they reveal the inherent fragility of equilibria once socially assumed to be long-standing or “reliable”. The reality of the 21^st century brings an indisputably more kaleidoscopic palette, concealing rising economic and social costs. As always throughout human history, many of these involve fundamental social commons, including seemingly far away or very near ones, like freshwater or critical minerals, whose search for and exploitation evoke vital resources and hidden hazards, often resulting in socio-economic complexities or tensions.

While acknowledging that novel mindsets are needed – now – to advance societies and protect human life, knowledge and cross-disciplinary insight can and should be strategic means to help design peaceful, fruitful prospects that lead to concrete cooperation, locally and beyond. Helping to build a socially aware approach to address the contrasts that energy, climate, and boundaries strain can be challenging but enriching, puzzling but revealing, and disconcerting but illuminating. Above all, contemporary crises at the nexus between climate and resources are multiple, exposing systemic fragilities and delicate, shifting boundaries across risks and resources.