Resources and Trade

What Are Natural Resources?

A natural resource is something from nature that people use. Water, soil, trees, fish, metals and oil are all natural resources. So are sunlight and wind. People did not make them. But people decide what counts as useful.

That choice changes over time (National Geographic, Geography Standard 16). Oil sat under the ground for millions of years before engines made it valuable. Today about 88% of the lithium used worldwide goes into batteries (USGS, 2025 estimate).

Resources also shape where people live. People settle where they can make a living. They look for fertile soil, clean drinking water, fuel and building materials (National Geographic, Standard 16).

Flow, Renewable and Nonrenewable

Geographers sort resources by how fast nature replaces them. National Geographic's Standard 16 uses three groups.

1 Flow resources

Sunlight, wind and moving water never run out. But they must be used when and where they occur. You can't save today's wind for next week unless you turn it into stored power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says renewable sources are "virtually inexhaustible," but "limited by the availability of the resources."

2 Renewable resources

Trees, fish, crops and farm animals grow back. They stay renewable only if people use them with care. If a forest is cut faster than it regrows, it shrinks. If boats catch fish faster than the fish breed, the stock falls.

3 Nonrenewable resources

Oil, coal, natural gas, uranium and metal ores took millions of years to form. The EIA says supplies are limited to what we can mine or extract. Once a deposit is used up, it is gone for any human lifetime. Metals are a partial exception, because they can be recycled. In the United States, recycled scrap supplied about 30% of copper in 2025 (USGS).

Some resources sit on the line. Soil forms very slowly. It can take over 1,000 years to make just 1 cm of soil. So the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calls soil a nonrenewable resource on a human timescale (FAO, 2017). Yet about 95% of our food is grown in soil. Groundwater refills from rain, but in dry places it can refill far more slowly than wells pump it out.

Where Key Resources Are Found, and Why

Resources are spread unevenly across Earth (National Geographic, Geography Standard 11). The table shows where some key ones are. The "why" column links to ideas from earlier units. Shares are of the world total, for the year shown.

Having a resource is not the same as using it. A country also needs workers, tools, money and a way to move the goods. Many places that mine metals ship them abroad to be refined.

How Geography Shapes Economies

An economy is the way people in a place make, sell and use goods and services. Geographers group jobs into four economic sectors. Each one uses the work of the one before it. The examples below come from National Geographic's Geography Standard 11.

• Primary: taking resources from nature. Examples are forestry, copper mining and growing coffee.
• Secondary: turning raw materials into goods. Timber becomes furniture, copper becomes wire, and coffee beans are ground.
• Tertiary: services. Truckers, store clerks and nurses all work in this sector.
• Quaternary: work with information and ideas, such as research and advertising.

Where a place is on the map affects which jobs it has. Here are three ways.

Coasts and harbors

A harbor is a sheltered body of water where ships can dock. New York City has one of the world's finest natural harbors, with deep water and a small tidal range. San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney also have fine natural harbors. Where nature did not make one, people build breakwaters and dredge channels (National Geographic, "Harbor"). Port cities often grow into centers of trade, shipping and banking.

Rivers and lakes

Rivers carry boats and barges inland, cheaply. They also bring water and silt to farms. Harbors on North America's Great Lakes, such as Chicago and Toronto, are still some of the busiest for industrial ships. They carry iron, steel and timber (National Geographic).

Landlocked countries

A landlocked country has no coast. Bolivia, Mali, Mongolia and Switzerland are examples. Their sea trade must cross at least one neighbor's land to reach a port. That adds time, paperwork and cost. Landlocked countries often rely on roads, railways, pipelines, rivers and air freight, and on good ties with their neighbors.

Trade Routes of the Past

Trade is old. Long before engines, people moved goods across deserts, mountains and seas. Geography decided where the routes went.

The Silk Road

The Silk Road was not one road. It was a network of routes, about 6,437 km long, used from about 130 BCE to 1453 CE, in one common dating (National Geographic). A German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen, gave it the name in 1877. Camel caravans crossed the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains. They rested at roadside inns called caravanserais. Few traders went the whole way. Goods passed from one middleman to the next. Silk, jade, porcelain, tea and spices moved west. Horses, glassware and cloth moved east. Ideas, religions and diseases traveled along the routes too.

Indian Ocean monsoon trade

The monsoon is a wind that reverses with the seasons (Britannica). In summer it blows from the southwest, from the sea toward land. In winter it blows from the northeast. Sailors made good use of it. A ship could sail east toward India on the summer wind and return west on the winter wind. Arab sailors in boats called dhows traded along the East African coast as far south as Sofala. They also sailed into the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf (Britannica).

Trans-Saharan trade

The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert. Camel caravans crossed it to link West Africa with North Africa. West Africa had gold. The Sahara had salt, mined at places such as Taghaza. The Mali Empire, from the 1200s to the 1500s, grew rich by controlling and taxing this gold-for-salt trade. Timbuktu and Gao became busy trading cities. In 1324 Mali's ruler, Mansa Musa, made a famous pilgrimage to Mecca (Britannica).

Sea Lanes and Chokepoints Today

Today ships carry around 80% of the world's goods trade by volume (UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport). Since the 1960s, most of those goods have moved in containers. These are steel boxes of standard sizes (Britannica). A box can leave a factory on a truck, ride a train to a port and cross the sea on a ship. Nobody has to unpack it along the way.

Many sea lanes squeeze through narrow passages called chokepoints. A strait is a narrow water passage between two larger bodies of water. A canal is a strait that people dug (National Geographic, "Strait"). If a chokepoint is blocked, ships must wait or take a much longer way around.

The EIA lists most of these as "world oil transit chokepoints." In 2024 about 79.7 million barrels of oil a day moved by sea (EIA). Gibraltar is included here because National Geographic names it as a key strait.

When a chokepoint is disrupted

Two recent events show how geography and trade connect.

• Drought at Panama. The Panama Canal needs fresh water from Gatun Lake to work its locks. In 2023 an El Niño drought left the lake unusually low. October 2023 was the driest October on record for the canal's watershed. In December 2023 the canal allowed 22 ships a day, down from a normal 36 (Panama Canal Authority). This links back to climate: a canal can depend on rain.
• Fewer ships in the Red Sea and at Hormuz. Ships passing through the Suez Canal fell from 26,434 in 2023 to 13,213 in 2024 and 12,758 in 2025 (Britannica, using Suez Canal Authority data). Many ships went the long way around Africa instead. From 2023 to 2024, oil carried through the Suez Canal and the SUMED pipeline beside it fell from 8.8 to 4.8 million barrels a day. Over the same time, oil carried around the Cape of Good Hope rose from 6.2 to 9.3 million (EIA). Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted since early 2026. The EIA estimated that about 21.6 million barrels of oil a day flowed there in the last three months of 2025. Its estimate for the second quarter of 2026 was about 4.9 million (EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, Energy security supplement). UNCTAD notes that Hormuz normally carries about a quarter of the world's seaborne oil and about a third of its seaborne fertilizer.

Trade can also adjust. The World Trade Organization (WTO) reported that in the first half of 2026, Middle East crude oil exports fell 24%. World crude exports fell only about 6%, because other suppliers shipped more (WTO, October 2026).

Why Countries Trade

An export is a good or service sold to another country. An import is one bought from another country. Most countries do both, every day.

Specialization

No place can make everything well. Cacao trees need steady warmth and lots of rain, so they grow only in the tropics (Britannica). A cold country can't grow them outdoors. But it might make machines or software. When a place focuses on what it makes best, that is specialization.

Comparative advantage

In the 1800s the British economist David Ricardo explained why trade can help both sides, even when one side is better at everything (Britannica). The idea is called comparative advantage. Think of two students making a class poster. Ana draws faster and writes faster than Ben. But Ana is much faster at drawing, and only a little faster at writing. If Ana draws and Ben writes, the poster gets done sooner than if each did half of both. Countries work the same way. Each one does best by focusing on what it gives up the least to make, then trading.

Trade has costs too. A country that depends on one export can be hurt when its price drops. A country that imports most of its fuel or food can be hurt when a chokepoint closes. That is why many countries try to trade with several partners.

One Chocolate Bar's Journey

A supply chain is every step a product takes, from raw material to buyer. Chocolate is a good example. Cacao is native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. Today it is grown in the American tropics, West Africa and tropical Asia. Most of it comes from small farms of less than 2 hectares (Britannica).

Farmers cut ripe pods and scoop out the beans. They ferment the beans for several days, then dry them (Britannica). The dry beans travel by truck to a port, then by ship, often in containers. A factory roasts and grinds the beans into a paste. Another step mixes in sugar and milk, which may come from other countries. The bars are wrapped, shipped again and sold.

So one bar can link farmers, sailors, factory workers and store clerks on several continents. This web of links is called global interdependence. National Geographic says trade and technology have made the world "more connected and interdependent." This is part of globalization. When one link breaks, prices can rise far away. A poor harvest or a blocked strait can do it.

Links to Earlier Units

• Maps, Globes and Coordinates: a flat map stretches the poles. Sea routes that look curved on this map are often the shorter paths on a globe.
• Continents and Oceans: the Suez Canal cuts through the land bridge between Africa and Asia. The Panama Canal cuts through the narrow land that joins North and South America.
• Landforms and Water: straits, harbors, deltas and floodplains all shape trade. Oil and gas are found with sedimentary rock.
• Climate and Biomes: climate decides where cacao, wheat and forests grow. Monsoon winds once set the sailing calendar, and drought can slow the Panama Canal.
• People and Cultures: people settle near resources and routes. Trade routes also spread languages, religions and foods.
• World Regions: functional regions are built by links such as trade. Southwest Asia's oil and the Sahara's old caravan routes both appeared on the regions tour.

Game: Sort It

Each round shows one resource. Decide which group it belongs in: flow, renewable or nonrenewable. A right answer on your first try is worth 2 points, and on your second try, 1. There are 10 rounds, so a perfect game is 20.

Quiz: Resources and Trade

Ten questions. Choose one answer for each, then check your score. You can try as many times as you like.

Credits

Written by Marco for Jugami's World Geography course. The sea lanes map, the old trade routes map and the chocolate supply chain diagram are original SVG illustrations made for this page. The maps use public-domain land shapes from Natural Earth. Routes are simplified and placed by hand, so they are not exact ship tracks.