During the twentieth century, the economic development that improved material standards of living for hundreds of millions of people was assisted by declining real prices for most materials, including food, fuel and metals. This situation may not be sustained through the twenty-first century as the rapid economic growth occurring simultaneously in many parts of the world will place much higher demands on supply infrastructure and the environment’s ability to continue supplying materials. The most notable example of such rapid and resource intensive growth is China (Schandl and West 2012), however rapidly increasing demand for primary materials is also seen in various Southeast Asian nations, India, Brazil and Nigeria, to name a few. When material demand accelerates in periods of rapid economic growth, the supply systems for primary materials such as mines, quarries, farms, forests and fisheries can become stressed by demand outstripping their existing production capacity. The resulting imbalances between global material supply capacity and demand will frequently be expressed in a price increase in world market prices for energy, timber, metals and minerals, and food. These elevated prices will persist until sufficient additional capacity is built, a process which typically requires several years, perhaps up to a decade. The extraction of natural sand from rivers and coasts in even modest amounts can be problematic due to both the environmental sensitivity of these areas, and their importance as sources of animal protein (in the form of fish) and of water, in the case of rivers. The full report is available at: http://unep.org/documents/irp/16-00169_LW_GlobalMaterialFlowsUNEReport_FINAL_160701.pdf