Sustainability - The 4Rs - Rethink
The World's Resources
How are the world’s resources distributed?
The word “population” means all the people living in a specific place, for example “the population of Sydney, Australia”; “France’s population“, or “the world’s population”.
At the moment, the people living in the richer countries of the world make up only 20% of the world’s population. These richer countries include:
- USA
- Canada
- Japan
- Saudi Arabia
- Western European and Scandinavian Countries (e.g. Germany, France, UK, Sweden, Norway, Denmark)
- Australia and New Zealand.
The people in these richer countries have more than 80% of all the money in the world, and use about 80% of all the resources in the world.
Why aren’t there enough resources for everyone?
Many people in the world today do not have enough food to eat and resources to use. This is not because there are not enough resources.
Enough food is being grown or made on our planet to feed every person in the world. The problem is that food and resources are not shared evenly. The richer people take too much and the poorer people are left with little.