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Though production rates for construction materials are generally available, potential capacity on a global scale is poorly understood. Commencement of infrastructure projects to address climate change, such as dikes and levees, could increase demand making critical resources scarce. Since increasing production capacity of scarce products can be a challenge, understanding current potential capacity is an imperative. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to assess capacity and to create one such global estimate for cement.

The proposed global hybrid method creates a global estimate of cement production capacity in four steps: collect capacity and production data from existing reports; select top regional capacity holders; compute regional utilisation; back‐calculate capacity from production.

The method overcomes shortfalls of other methods, but – like all estimating methods – is inherently limited by the amount of data available. It nonetheless provides economists, climate change scientists, government officials, investors, and other researchers a better understanding of current maximum global cement capacity.

Most studies only focus on industry demand and actual production, because these forces drive commodity pricing. Capacity is generally estimated either through surveying goods‐producing industries at the plant level or examining economic data. Methods that employ these types of analysis are useful for regional estimates of production, but are ineffective at the global scale.

The enormous financial losses during the economic crash in Iceland led to widespread anxieties, coupled with a deep sense of shared national disaster and moral collapse (Bernburg, 2015; Ólafsson, 2014). The strong sense of betrayal indicates how economic processes are not only about economic prosperity, but are embedded also in wider societal discourses and a sense of national identity (Schwegler, 2009). We use perspectives from anthropology and cultural economics to ask how the lack of trust by the Icelandic population after the crash signals both a different way of visualising Iceland’s role within an increasingly global world and a changing sense of Icelanders as national subjects standing unified against foreigners. Iceland’s neo-liberalisation inserted the country into global institutions and processes with the faith that these processes would automatically be beneficial to Iceland. Furthermore, the sense of some kind of a unified Icelandic subject was manifested in the image of the ‘Business Viking’, which was seen as embodying the interest of the Icelandic nation as a whole. Following the economic crash, the betrayal of trust involved disrupting the idea of the ‘oneness’ of Iceland and thus, the sharp distinction between ‘us’ Icelanders and ‘those’ foreigners. In our discussion, we trace different ways of conceptualising this sense of Icelanders as a unified entity, asking what this notion means in terms of trust. Our research shows how the sense of ‘unified Icelanders’ was instrumental in creating the feeling of trust, and how it is possible to manipulate and appropriate that trust.

The year 2020 brought a series of previously unknown experiences, events, and life situations to the world. Fear of unknown, uncertainty, unpredictability, and dramatic changes have had a strong impact on all strata and segments of society. We assume that global happenings of the last decade, climate change, pandemic followed by its related strict restrictions mean a determining event for youngsters which fundamentally shapes their lifestyle, future prospects, problem perception, and their generational characteristics as well. In our study, we examine the real-life situation of students at the University of Szeged from numerous aspects, with particular regard to the possible generation-transforming role of climate and quarantine situation, and we also scrutinize to what extent our previous estimations can be verified with data. The online data collection was carried out in the spring of 2021, the sample contains 1195 members. As the result of the data analysis, we indicated that the coronavirus epidemic does not play a leading role in the problem perception of the students, however, their responses about their self-characterization testify on increased perception of crisis phenomena. Although public life and public discourse have been thematized by the coronavirus epidemic since spring 2020, incompetence of politicians and global environmental change are the most serious problems for the students. In the basic dimensions of youth vulnerability namely in the field of education, leisure, and finance, the satisfaction of the students are the lowest. As a result of the restrictive measures, the online activity of the students has further strengthened; instead of silence and apolitical behavior, the students are characterized by a strong public–political interest, increased sensitivity to global problems in the third wave of the pandemic.