• population ageing is pervasive, that is a global phenomenon affecting every human being — although
countries and regions are at rather different stages of
this process, and the pace of change varies.
Countries that started the process later will have less timeto adjust;
•
population ageing is enduring: we will not return to the young populations that our ancestors knew;
•
population ageing has profound implications for many aspects of human life.
Consumption of natural resources is another factor to take into consideration.
A commonly used classification of natural resources includes the following types of resources [3]:
•
non-renewable and non -recyclable resources, such as fossil fuels;
•
non-renewable but recyclable resources, such as minerals;
•
quickly renewable resources, such as fish;
•
slowly renewable resources, such as forests;
•
environmental resources, such as air, water and soil;
•
flow resources, such as solar and wind energy.
A lot of schools on natural resource management have found and proposed a range of views, methods and strategies to lead society towards a sustainable use of natural resources,
in scientific literature they are primarily known as «concepts
on natural resource management». These concepts have different assumptions on how to evaluate the measure of sustainable
resource use. These differences primarily affect the determination of the actual targets within resource management.
The main ideas of the most widespread concepts on resource management are presented in Table 1.