The US And EU Have Unsustainably Plundered Natural Resources For Decades, Study Shows

A new study shows how excessive and harmful this pattern of plunder really is, despite accounting for only a small percentage of the world's population.

The United States and high-income countries in the European Union drove the lion's share of global excess resource use beyond thresholds of environmentalsustainability, according to an analysis looking back over almost 50 years of natural resource extraction across the world.

The results show that wealthy nations owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world.

These nations need to take the lead in making radical reductions in their resource use to avoid further degradation.

In a previous study, Hickel attempted to quantify responsibility for the climate crisis at the national level, by analyzing how much countries across the world exceeded their fair share of carbon dioxide emissions.

In the new work, Hickel and fellow researchers applied the same kind of methodology to resource extraction, which is considered to be a key starting point for environmental degradation.

The team writes in the new paper that the world economy is consuming over 90 billion tonnes of materials per year.

Some nations use more resources per capita than others.

To identify where countries fall in terms of over-extraction responsibility, the team developed a sustainable global limit for annual resource extraction for the period 1970 to 2017, then calculated.

The results show that over half of the 2.5 trillion tonnes of materials used in the world were in excess of the safe, sustainable corridor.

Despite only 16 percent of the global population, high-income countries were responsible for 74 percent of excess use.

The US was responsible for 27 percent of the excess, followed by EU countries and the UK, which together accounted for 25 percent of global excess resource use.

You can easily explore the results of the analysis by visiting an interactive website developed by the researchers.

If the world is to have any chance of addressing ecological crises, consumption of raw materials needs to sharply decline.

The authors of the study write that high-income nations need to scale down aggregate resource use to sustainable levels.

According to Hickel, it is a question that might require some rethinking of what the global economy really ought to be.

The economy is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world, he said.

We have to decide if we want that relationship to be based on exploitation or on care.

The findings are reported in a journal.