Companies of varying sizes collectively extract around 50 billion tons of sand and gravel annually for construction and industrial purposes, demonstrating an unsustainable practice from any perspective.
With this annual extraction, a wall 27 meters wide and 27 meters high could be built around the entire equator, explained the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), in its assessment of the ongoing disaster.
It noted that sand acts as a natural water filter, protects coastlines from erosion, prevents the salinization of coastal aquifers, and provides crucial habitats for fish, plants, turtles, birds, crabs, and other species of flora and fauna.
Although it is a finite resource, its exploitation is likely to grow in the coming years, as countries invest in climate adaptation, urban expansion and infrastructure, including works for the use of renewable energies.
Artificial beaches, skyscrapers, ports, and flood barriers require enormous quantities of sand and gravel; but their excessive extraction from rivers, deltas, and coastal areas threatens the ecosystems that protect communities from storms, erosion, and saltwater intrusion, experts argue.
"That's the dilemma. We want both living and dead sand," said Pascal Peduzzi, a UNEP official, during the presentation in Geneva, Switzerland, of the report "Sand and Sustainability: An Essential Resource for Nature and Development," published in May 2026.
The scale of the problem is alarming: by 2020, the physical mass of the built environment had already exceeded the mass of all living biomass on Earth. Almost 90% of that biomass is composed of sand and gravel, used directly for foundations and roads, or indirectly through concrete, asphalt, and glass, the analysis confirmed.
In a previous report – Sand and Sustainability: 10 Strategic Recommendations to Avoid a Crisis – the United Nations agency advocated in 2022 for an international standard on how sand is extracted from the seas.
This, it assessed, could lead to significant improvements, since most marine dredging is carried out through public tenders open to international companies.
To achieve sustainable development on Earth, "we have to drastically change the way we produce, build, and consume products, infrastructure, and services," Peduzzi stated at the time.
"If we can control how we manage the most extracted solid material in the world, we can avoid a crisis and move toward a circular economy," he emphasized.
For policymakers, the challenge is clear: to integrate sustainable sand management into broader national and regional environmental and development agendas; to strengthen governance frameworks; and to promote innovation in material efficiency and circular economy approaches, the 2026 report indicated.
Despite the documented damage, practices on the ground have barely changed. According to UNEP, "demand continues to rise, governance remains fragmented, and extraction is often driven by a short-term logic, with actors seeking immediate economic benefits while accumulating long-term environmental, social, and economic costs."
The challenges are ubiquitous. For example, in the industrial sector, extraction—associated with large-scale projects—is often led by multinational corporations and financed through complex transnational agreements, with limited oversight and few accountability mechanisms.
At the local level, artisanal and small-scale sand mining remains highly dispersed and largely informal, providing significant income opportunities but operating outside effective regulatory and environmental monitoring frameworks.
"The sand crisis is no longer hypothetical," asserts UNEP. Globally, the shortage is paralyzing major infrastructure projects, and demand for sand, in the construction sector alone, could rise by 45% by 2060.
Unlike many environmental challenges, where delays in action have led to escalating and irreversible costs, there is still an opportunity for timely and coordinated intervention, the UN agency believes.
Natural resource management, it emphasized, is "ultimately a development decision. The question is not whether sand will be used, but how, how much, where, and at what cost to nature and society."
