The world now extracts 106 billion tonnes a year

Everything the economy makes begins as extracted material — biomass, fossil fuels, metals and non-metallic minerals like sand and gravel. That total, the material footprint, has grown from about 30 billion tonnes in 1970 to roughly 106 billion tonnes a year today.

The hidden driver of many crises

The UN's International Resource Panel estimates that resource extraction and processing account for about 55% of greenhouse-gas emissions and a large share of biodiversity loss and water stress. In other words, how much stuff we dig up and harvest sits upstream of many of the indicators tracked elsewhere on this site.

The trajectory

On current trends, material use is projected to grow a further ~60% by 2060. But the IRP argues this is not inevitable: with resource-efficiency and circular-economy policies, global extraction could instead peak around 2040 while living standards continue to rise — decoupling prosperity from raw throughput.

Why it is the master indicator

Material use ties together climate, land, water and waste. Reducing it — through efficiency, reuse, recycling and longer-lived products — eases pressure across all of them at once. That makes the material footprint one of the most powerful, if least familiar, environmental indicators.