Nature
PUBLISHED
A small minority of people – the top 10 percent of global consumers – are disproportionately responsible for environmental damage, costing the planet between $1.7 trillion and $5.7 trillion every year.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.In a new study, environmental scientists from Leiden University and the University of Oxford looked at how the top 10 percent of global consumers are impacting four planetary boundaries in terms of money: climate change, biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution, and freshwater use.
In sum, they found that the average person in this top 10 percent effectively runs up an annual environmental "bill" of $2,300 to $7,500.
But the bill varies sharply by region. In the US, where per-person impacts are highest, that same figure rises to $19,000 to $63,000 each year.
A price on nature
The figures were calculated using the Environmental Prices Handbook 2024, which provides rough estimates of the monetary cost of damage across different types of consumer behaviours and the environmental harm they're tied to.
These costs stem from all manner of things, from the gallons of water used to grow your almonds and the forests cleared to farm your low-cost beef, to the amount of gas-guzzling travel you do each year and the size of your home.
"While I find it uncomfortable to put a price on the environment, as nature's true value is infinite, showing total damage in money terms does show the size of both the damages and responsibility of the top 10 percent,” Inge Schrijver, lead study author from the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in a statement.
If anything, these are conservative figures, the researchers warn. This is because their analysis only focused on personal consumption, rather than investments, which account for more than half of emissions.
On top of that, much of the consumption data dates back to 2017, and we know global consumption has only escalated since then.
Are you in the top 10 percent of global consumers?
Bear in mind, this study isn’t targeted at an uber-elite group of billionaires floating around in their mega-yachts – there’s a good chance you’re in this 10 percent of global consumers. Over 60 percent of the top 10 percent of global consumers live in the US and the EU. In the US, over half the population is in this top minority, and in the EU it’s around 40 to 45 percent.
The top 10 percent have the power to make change
The irony is that this top 10 percent, while inflicting the most damage on the environment, also holds the most power to change things.
“The top 10 percent are important not only because they cause the most damage but also because they hold the most leverage to reduce it. The capital they invest, from pensions to infrastructure, decides which industries expand, the firms they run set the choices for everyone else, and the lifestyles they pursue shape what people consider normal,” explained Paul Behrens, British Academy Global Professor at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, and co-author of the study.
"They often have outsized agency, not only individually as consumers, but also as investors, employers, trend makers and market shapers. Their power to cut emissions is even larger than their share of them," he added.
In yet another twist of irony, this top 10 percent of consumers won’t bear the brunt of the problem. Other research has shown how the Global South will be disproportionately affected by climate-related natural disasters, despite the Global North being responsible for 92 percent of excess global carbon emissions.
This is before we even consider the unbalanced impact of pollution, land exploitation, and water scarcity, all of which tend to hit the world's poorest regions hardest.
The study is published in the journal Communications Sustainability.
