We are consuming beyond our means. Numerous scientific studies over the years have painted a picture of an Earth stripped of natural resources, stretched thin, unable to catch up with the consumption appetites of its primary inhabitants. The result has been rapidly accelerating environmental damage. Although everyone had some role to play in the current trajectory of environmental degradation, that responsibility is not equally shared. According to a study published in Nature’s Communications Sustainability journal on Thursday, the highest-consuming 10% of the world’s population causes up to $5.7 trillion worth of environmental damage every year. Even at the most conservative estimates, the damage is worth $1.7 trillion a year, high enough that it could easily pay for the combined amount needed to both reach the UN’s 2035 climate financing target and bridge the gap for the 2030 biodiversity financing target. The average member of the world’s top 10% of consumers causes up to $7,500 in environmental damage each year, according to a study by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
Even the worst-case scenario is likely conservative, the researchers say, because only direct consumption is being studied. Among the highest earners in this heavy-polluter group, investments account for roughly half of their emissions—but those emissions were excluded from the analysis.
