The twin issues of Energy and Resource Sustainability, along with Water Scarcity are major issues for the global community where rising expectations for shared prosperity confront pre 21st century models of resource availability and cost. The developed world model, of cheap and abundant natural resources propelled unsustainable expectations and growth. The developing world model which confronts a more costly and constrained access to natural resources, yet still with abundant and accelerating human expectations, increasingly must grow by a different model than the one followed by the developed world.

Energy and Resource Sustainability is the area where NCSD is using its "demonstration model" approach to help developing societies with a "middle way". China with its vast population and its need to conserve and develop alternatives to provide the necessary building blocks of economic prosperity has recognized that a "sustainable future" can be a truly prosperous one.

As is often the case, the answers for sustainable development are often "hidden in plain sight." The fundamentals of supply and demand are universal constants in the pricing of the resources and are driving the adoption of newer sustainable methods to make more efficient the use of existing and new alternatives to resources that have become to costly to produce or to use just once. The developed world has embraced this model to some extent in the last twenty-five years but as an afterthought: not as the developing world must as a key part of its long term growth and prosperity strategy.