Wealthy countries led by the U.S. and Europe have contributed far more to unsustainable resource use over the last 50 years than poorer nations, a first-of-its-kind study published in the Lancet Planetary Health found.
Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:
Environmental destruction is a global problem, but not everyone on Earth is equally responsible.
A first-of-its-kind study published in the Lancet Planetary Health April 1 found that wealthy countries led by the U.S. and Europe have contributed far more to unsustainable resource use over the last 50 years than poorer nations.
“[H]igh-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels,” the study authors concluded. “Achieving sufficient reductions will likely require high-income nations to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches.”
The researchers calculated the “fair share” of resources that every country could sustainably use based on their population size, The Guardian explained. They then subtracted that number from the amount of resources that countries actually used between 1970 and 2017. The difference was how much each country had overshot sustainable resource use, determining its culpability for the global environmental crisis.
The researchers found that wealthy nations were responsible for 74 percent of excess resource use during the study period. The U.S. was the single biggest resource thief, responsible for 27 percent of the global overshoot. The EU and the UK together followed with 25 percent, while other wealthy countries including Australia, Canada, Japan and Saudi Arabia were responsible for 22 percent.
