Strategies for adaptation fall into two categories. First, a society can continue to rely on its indigenous environmental resources but use them more sustainably. Second, the society can sometimes decouple itself from dependence on its scarce environmental resources by producing goods and services that do not rely heavily on these resources. The country can then trade these products on the international market for things it can no longer produce at home because of local natural resource scarcities. In the next decades, population growth, rising average resource demand, and persistent inequalities in resource access ensure that scarcities will affect many environmentally sensitive regions with a severity, speed, and scale unprecedented in history.
Some poor countries are ill-equipped to adapt.
These countries are underendowed with key social institutions, including research centres, efficient markets, competent government bureaucracies, and uncorrupt legal mechanisms. Such social institutions are essential prerequisites for an ample supply of the social and technical ingenuity that produces solutions to scarcity. Moreover, a society's ability to generate and deliver ingenuity can be diminished by the very environmental scarcity the society needs to address, since scarcity often engenders competition among powerful groups that blocks institutional reform. If social and economic adaptation is unsuccessful, environmental scarcity constrains economic development and contributes to migrations. Developing economies tend to depend on their environmental resource base for a large part of their economic production and employment.