The study, published in The Lancet journal of Planetary Health in April 2022, found that high-income nations representing only 16% of the world's population are responsible for 74% of global excess material use—materials such as fossil fuels, metals, minerals and biomass. Researchers state that 27% of excess material use has been driven primarily by the US and 25% from the wealthier countries of Europe, including the UK.
These countries are therefore responsible for the majority of the global ecological damage in the past half-century.
The researchers based their analysis on the concept that the planet’s resources and ecosystems are a natural shared wealth, thus all people should be entitled to a fair share within sustainable levels. They did this based on countries’ population size, and then subtracted these fair shares from the countries’ actual resource use to determine the extent to which they overshot the fair share over the period 1970–2017.
China overshot its sustainability limit and is responsible for 15% of global excess material use, while the rest of the “global south” (low-to-middle-income countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and Asia) was collectively responsible for 8%.
The study determined that 58 countries including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh, bear no responsibility for excess resource use as they remained within their fair share threshold over the 50-year period.
