The impact of growing demand for natural resources and environmental pressures on national and international politics puts the transatlantic community at a crossroads with both opportunities of new innovations and global risks of intense conflicts. Certainly, tight commodity markets also offer business opportunities for saving materials purchasing costs and to innovate. Comparing the United States with Europe, it seems that the strategy of resource efficiency is high on the European policy agenda while it is largely absent across large parts of the United States (with huge variations across countries and states). Yet market volatility, the frequent lack of transparency and openness of many commodities markets and poor governance deter the investments and innovations needed, absent better governance. Much more stringent effort is required to unleash resource efficiency on all relevant markets both in the transatlantic community and internationally. With proper policies in place, the 95 resources-dependent countries that exist worldwide could potentially turn their endowments into development opportunities for the bottom billion of poor people. High commodity prices also have spurred technological development and created new energy resources, ranging from offshore oil fields to unconventional gas.
A main research premise of this study group is that without an explicit international dimension, resource efficiency strategies face an uphill battle against existing distortions and unfair international competition.
The study group focuses attention on the complex webs of connections existing between different resources, and the challenges and opportunities these pose on governance. These attempts to grapple with the complex inter-linkages among multiple resource issues on different scales, can be called the resource nexus approach.
The study group was established, as a group of resident fellows, at the Transatlantic Academy, at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in Washington DC in September 2011. Its members have published a joint report in June 2012, as well as a set of working papers. The aim of this project is to sustain and expand the work of the group over the next year, bringing their draft work to fruition in 2013 by publishing papers and a book.
Members of the study group: Prof. Dr. Raimund Bleischwitz, Wuppertal Institute and Prof. Dr. Stacy VanDeveer, University of New Hampshire USA (both acting as coordinators); Prof. Dr. Philip Andrews-Speed, University of Singapore; Tim Boersma, University of Groningen The Netherlands; Dr. Geoffrey Kemp, Center for the National Interest USA; Prof. Dr. Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina, Greensboro USA.