A UN report on Tuesday called for urgent action to avert a "sand crisis," including a ban on beach extraction as demand surges to 50 billion tonnes a year amid population growth and urbanisation.

Sand is the most exploited natural resource in the world after water, but its use is largely ungoverned, meaning we are consuming it faster than it can be replaced by geological processes that take hundreds of thousands of years, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report says.

Global consumption for use in...