A new study led by MIT researchers looks ahead to 2050. It asks a challenging question: who will struggle to afford basic resources like food, water, and energy? The answer, it turns out, depends heavily on where you live and how much you earn.
The researchers found that poorer households in some regions could spend around half of their income just on food by 2050. Wealthier households in those same regions might spend only about 5 per cent. That gap is enormous.
Jennifer Morris, a research scientist at MIT, helped lead the study. She explains that lower-income groups face much greater risk across many possible future scenarios. Spending half your income on one basic need is dangerous, she says. This situation leaves almost nothing for other essential aspects of life.
A Massive Modelling Effort
The study didn’t rely on guesswork. The team built thousands of possible future scenarios using a tool called the Global Change Analysis Model, or GCAM. This model splits the world into 32 regions, hundreds of water basins, and hundreds of land-use zones.
The researchers tracked 12 major factors. These included population growth, economic growth, income inequality, farming output, trade policy, water use, energy use, and climate change. By mixing and matching these factors, they created 3,735 different possible futures.
Most past studies used only a handful of broad global scenarios. Those scenarios describe general storylines about the future, but they don’t dig into details like income differences within a country. This new study aims to fix that gap. The same research team had called for this kind of more profound analysis two years earlier. Now they’ve built it.
Gi Joo Kim, a co-author from Tulane University, says there’s no single cause of future resource problems. Income matters, he explains, but so do local farming conditions, energy systems, water supplies, and even consumer habits. Every region faces its own unique mix of risks.
Regional Differences Are Stark
The modelling points to Africa as a major hotspot for food insecurity. In southern Africa, the poorest 10 per cent of people could spend nearly 50 per cent of their income on food by 2050. The wealthiest 10 per cent in that same region might spend under 6 per cent.
West Africa and East Africa show similar patterns. The poorest groups there could spend more than 40 per cent of their income on food. That’s a sharp rise from 2015, when the poorest households in West Africa spent roughly 25 per cent of their income on food.
Energy costs show a similar divide. In parts of the Middle East, the wealthiest households might spend less than 2 per cent of their income on energy in 2050. But the poorest households in the same region could spend nearly 19 per cent. Eastern Europe shows a similar income gap for energy spending.
Kim points out a key lesson here. Regional averages can hide the truth. If you only look at an average number for a whole country or region, you might think things look fine. But that average can mask serious struggles faced by the poorest people. Studies that stop at averages risk missing the very people who are most at risk.
Planning for an Uncertain Future
The researchers are careful to note that these are not firm predictions. Nobody can say exactly what 2050 will look like. Too many factors are involved, and the future remains uncertain. Instead, the goal was to map out a wide range of possible outcomes.
Morris says this kind of study highlights where concerns are strongest and shows that these concerns differ around the globe. This mapping can guide future research toward the regions and issues that need the most attention.
The study’s approach also helps policymakers understand which specific factors drive different outcomes. Rather than betting on one single future, planners can look at many possible futures and prepare for a range of them. Kim says the method was built to reveal what conditions lead to different results, not to predict one certain path.
Morris adds that this scenario-based approach is unusual in the field. Its flexibility is part of why it has attracted so much interest from other researchers and policymakers.
The study, published in the journal Earth’s Future, was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Stanford University, and the National Research Foundation of Korea. Beyond Morris and Kim, the authors include researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Stanford University, and Tufts University.
