A groundbreaking study has shown that the US and Europe are responsible in large part for the environmental damage caused by overuse of natural resource.
This paper is the first to analyze and assign responsibility for the ecological damages caused by 160 countries in the past half century.
It finds that the US is responsible for 27%, followed by the EU (25%), and the UK (which included the UK) during the analysis period. 22% was also attributed to other rich countries such Canada, Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.
China exceeded its sustainability limit to claim 15% resource overuse. However, the analysis showed that the global south’s poorer countries were responsible for only 8% of this figure.
It states that high-income countries are the main drivers of global ecological collapse and must urgently reduce their use of resources to fair and sustainable levels.
These nations must take responsibility for reducing their ecological debt to the rest of the globe. This will likely require transformational post-growth or degrowth approaches, according to the study published in the journal. Lancet Planetary Health adds.
Prof Jason Hickel from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, (ICTA-UAB in Barcelona) was the lead author of this paper. He stated that the findings were disturbing and dramatic.
He told the Guardian that we were all shocked at the scale of high-income countries’ excess resource use. It was not something we expected to see. They need to reduce their resource usage by around 70% a year if they want to sustainably achieve current levels.
He stated that the evidence suggests that this would require rich nations such as the UK or US to stop focusing only on GDP growth as their primary objective and instead organize their economies around supporting human well-being, reducing inequality.
Hickel and other papers authors distributed fair shares of globally sustainable resource use to countries based upon their population. These shares were then subtracted from the actual resource use of the country to determine ecological overshoots during the 1970-2017 period.
Australia was the leader in the world with 29.16 tonnes of overshoot/person. Canada was close behind at 25.82, followed by the USA at 23.45.
The UN data provided data that allowed for the analysis of domestic extraction and global trade flows for resources like fossil fuels, timber, minerals, metals, and biomass. International resource panelExtrapolated calculations.
Janez Potonik (co-chair of UN panel) described the conclusions of the study as logically sound and correct. He said that countries with high incomes are those that push the boundaries of the planet. They have the economic rules and the regulations. [global]They must demonstrate that they can and will lead the way to sustainability by meeting standards.
Kate Raworth, an economist and senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, stated that a new era of global accountability is emerging thanks to powerful analyses such as this one. These new metrics provide powerful new clarity on long-standing injustices between global north and south. We must now make meaningful reparations to those who have been most affected by the irresponsible actions of the world’s richest countries in destroying the life-support infrastructures of our planet home.
The new study found that 44% of the planet’s 2.5tn tonnes of extracted material was used by countries that had overtaken their fair share of resource usage.
58 countries, including India and Pakistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, maintained their sustainability limits during the same period.
If they made it mandatory for producers to stop using such practices, degrowth strategies could make people’s lives better. Built-in obsolescenceHickel stated that public transit was expanded and incentives were given to repair, recycle, and reuse.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes was established earlier this year. Sixth assessment of climate adaptationHickel and other experts were quoted to argue that such strategies offered enough social transformation for maintenance and sustainability. [a]Increased wellbeing, combined with a smaller footprint.
Andrew Fanning, a University of Leeds researcher, also highlighted that not all people living in wealthy countries are equally responsible for ecological collapse. Reducing inequality between countries and reducing our dependence on growth also means reducing inequalities in lived experience within those countries.
According to the IPCC’s latest report, degrowth pathways could be essential for combining social progress and technically feasible mitigation strategies.
Dr Gemma Cranston, director of business and nature at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, stated that the degrowth idea was potential but would require a paradigm change from the corporate sector, and active transformation in consumption. [patterns].
She said that countries and businesses need to do more than reduce their impact. Instead, they should adopt regenerative and restorative approaches.