The Edge: How Competition for resources is pushing the world, and its climate, to the brink - and what we can do about it

We are at the edge, not the end, of history.
The world is reaching its limits and is at war over the critical natural resources that define them.
The economy, everyone and everything depends on energy, as well as the minerals and water needed to generate it. Everyone depends on food, which is being cut off by conflict over it. Competition for, and relentless consumption of, natural resources is manifesting itself on the global stage in the form of geopolitical conflict and climate change.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which means, literally ‘on the edge’, signified a profound dislocation, a ‘hand-break turn’ for energy and foreign policy that has shone a global-scale spotlight on the issues of competition for resources, energy security, and the economic and environmental consequences of failure for countries, companies, and populations.
The Edge is about our limits, but also a turning point. Have we reached one now, why, so what, and what should we do about it?
The Edge seeks to explain ‘why’ the world is facing so many of the challenges ahead of it today, to ask ‘so what’, in terms of the implications for individuals, society and the planet, and what we can do about it. It seeks to establish a framework to explain what is happening in the world today. So, as new news emerges every day, such as the UK’s financial crisis, the European energy crisis, sabotage of gas pipelines, extreme weather events in the United States, the debates over climate action and Russian aggression in the Ukraine, we can recognise the patterns they fit, and their root causes.
The Edge sheds light on problems, in order to reveal solutions. One of our biggest problems, that we waste most of the natural resources that we depend on and complete for, with global geopolitical, economic and environmental consequences, is also the source of one of our greatest opportunities…
An important contribution. One of the huge comparative advantages of this book is the seriousness and knowledge about energy and efficiency. It explains how critical resource efficiency, relating to energy, but also to other scarce resources such as food, water, minerals, and time will be to managing the enormous geopolitical, economic, and environmental challenges in front of all of us today.

Lord Stern, Chair of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and head of the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change.