The consumption of mineral resources and energy has increased exponentially over the last 100 years. Further growth is expected until at least the middle of the 21^st century as the demand for minerals is stimulated by the industrialization of poor countries, increasing urbanization, penetration of rapidly evolving high technologies, and the transition to low-carbon energies. In order to meet this demand, more metals will have to be produced by 2050 than over the last 100 years, which raises questions about the sustainability and conditions of supply. The answers to these questions are not only a matter of available reserves. Major effort will be required to develop new approaches and dynamic models to address social, economic, environmental, geological, technological, legal and geopolitical impacts of the need for resources.

Humanity is using mineral resources at an unprecedented level and demand will continue to grow over the next few decades before stabilizing by the end of the century, due to the economic development of populated countries and the energy and digital transitions. The demand for raw materials must be estimated with a bottom-up and regionalised approach and the supply capacity with approaches coupling long-term prices with energy and production costs controlled by the quality of the resource and the rate of technological improvement that depends on thermodynamic limits. Such modelling provides arguments in favour of two classically opposed visions of the future of mineral resources: an unaffordable increase in costs and prices following the depletion of high quality deposits or, on the contrary, a favourable compensation by technological improvements. Both views are true, but not at the same time. After a period of energy and production cost gains, we now appear to be entering a pivotal period of long-term production cost increases as we approach the minimum practical energy and thermodynamic limits for many metals.

The evolution from 2000 to 2050 of the needs in concrete, steel, aluminium and copper to build the infrastructure of electricity generation is modelled for the scenarios of García-Olivares et al. (2012), Ecofys-WWF (2012) and the blue map scenario of the IEA (2010). A simple dynamic model is used to estimate the primary production, recycling and lost flows as well as the cumulative stocks of material to be produced, to go into the infrastructure and to be lost. The energy of material production is also estimated. When compared with the expected evolution of global material and energy demands, the modelling results suggest that i) the transition to low-carbon energies implies a substantial increase of raw materials and energy consumption, ii) the shorter lifetime of wind and solar facilities and the loss of recycling implies that the total amount of metal to be produced during the deployment of the infrastructure of energy is significantly higher than their amount stocked in the infrastructure, and iii) the needs in materials and energy will occur in a period of expected increase of primary metal consumption at the world scale and limited potential of recycling

Consumption-based carbon assessments are essential for evaluating climate change responsibility. However, the results vary greatly depending on the boundary chosen, making them hard to understand for non-expert readers and hindering their uptake by policy makers. Sankey diagrams are a type of flow diagram where the thickness of a flow is proportional to its value. They allow to shed light on the various ways to calculate carbon footprints and on the implications of choosing one method over another. Although several multi-regional input-output databases allow for the calculation of footprints, none of them has been systematically represented as Sankey diagrams. To fill this gap, we build an open access web application to represent carbon footprints for 49 world regions between 1995 and 2019 based on EXIOBASE 3 data. We include production-based, consumption-based and consumption-based with capital endogenized accounts. We then provide examples of the insights gained with such diagrams.