Ashleigh Morris, CEO and Co-Founder of Coreo
Ashleigh Morris, CEO and Co-Founder of Coreo

Systemic risk has become the conversation in every boardroom, but the conversation has not gone deep enough. The International Energy Agency's Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, published in July, projects that supply deficits for copper are set to persist through 2035, with a 25% shortfall. Data center electricity consumption will roughly double from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030, accounting for around 3% of global electricity demand by that date, according to the IEA's Key Questions on Energy and AI report. These are not distant projections. They are the arithmetic of the next five years.

Business leaders understand that these risks exist. What they often do not understand is how deeply the risks are embedded in the foundations of their own operations. The conversation stays at the level of awareness. It rarely descends to the level of the balance sheet, where the exposure actually sits.

Steel illustrates the gap. Everyone knows what steel is. Very few companies can answer where the metallurgical coal and iron ore came from, which countries refined them, how many suppliers were involved, or how much material was lost between extraction and fabrication. A large manufacturer may work with five to twenty different steel suppliers, each with its own upstream chain. The knowledge exists somewhere in the organization. It has simply never been assembled in one place.

The rise of artificial intelligence has made this visible. The minerals, water, and power that AI requires are the same finite resources that renewable energy, defense, agriculture, and ordinary communities depend on. The competition is no longer theoretical. It is happening now, and it is happening without a shared understanding of what remains.

Ashleigh Morris, CEO and Co-Founder of Coreo, has spent her career working on this problem from inside some of the largest companies in the world. Her framing is direct. "We are fighting over the slices," she says. "Nobody is measuring the pie." Around the table sit farmers, miners, data centres, cities, defence, and the renewables industry, each with a handout. Governments are handing out slices. Companies are lobbying for bigger ones. Almost nobody has asked how big the pie is, or how fast it is shrinking.

Her practice begins with three questions. Where do these things come from? How do we use them? Where do they go? The questions sound simple. Answering them is not. She describes a process called material flow analysis, which maps every input and output across a company's operations, making what had previously been scattered across departments visible. When a large organization sees the full picture laid out, she observes, the reaction is often surprise at how much material was entering the business, how much was being wasted, and how small a fraction was actually being sold.

The deeper problem is structural. In an organization of sixty thousand employees, someone or the other knows where each input comes from and where each output goes. But procurement rarely speaks to the waste team. The information exists in silos, and the silos do not communicate. The result is a company that is exposed to systemic risk without a systemic view of its own exposure.

This is where the circular economy enters the conversation, and where the common misunderstanding does the most damage. The circular economy is widely treated as a synonym for recycling. Morris argues this framing limits what circularity can actually achieve. In her view, the circular economy is not a waste management strategy. It is a different way for our economy to work, built on natural science and the recognition that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines it through three principles. Eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials at their highest value, and regenerate natural systems. In a properly built circular economy, the goal is to avoid the recycling stage altogether, because preventing waste from being created in the first place is the only realistic long-term strategy.

The forces reshaping the business landscape are not abstract. Geopolitical realignment, trade restrictions, conflict, climate volatility, and the cost of critical materials are already moving through supply chains and into pricing. Companies that understand their material flows will see these shifts coming. Companies that do not will continue to defend decisions they never had the information to make well.

The question is no longer whether systemic risk belongs on the board agenda. It is whether the boards most exposed to it are willing to find the number that is missing from every resource debate, and to measure the pie before the slices run out.