Despite making up a small percentage of the global population, wealthy countries have a long history of over-extracting raw materials from the globe, and a recent study shows just how extreme and hazardous this type of pillage is.
Researchers discovered that the U.S. and high-income countries in the E.U. drove the lion's share of global excess resource consumption beyond environmental sustainability thresholds in a study that looked back over nearly 50 years of natural resource extraction around the world.
"The findings show that rich nations bear the overwhelming responsibility for global ecological breakdown, and thus owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world," financial anthropologist Jason Hickel of Spain's Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona said.
Hickel attempted to quantify national culpability for the climate catastrophe in a prior study by examining how much countries around the world surpassed their fair share of a safe carbon dioxide emission threshold.
Hickel and colleagues applied the same methodology to useful resource extraction in the new study, which is widely regarded as a key starting point for where environmental degradation begins.
"World materials use has increased significantly over the last half-century, to the point that, as of 2017, the global economy consumes over 90 billion tonnes of supplies per year," the organization noted in a new document.
To determine where countries fall in terms of over-extraction responsibility, the researchers created a "sustainability corridor," which represents a safe or sustainable global limit for annual resource extraction (measured in billions of tonnes, or gigatonnes) from 1970 to 2017. They then calculated how much nations over-or under-shot that threshold each year based on population size.
The findings show that almost 2.5 trillion tonnes of materials were taken and used globally throughout the study period, with over half of that amount (1.1 trillion tonnes) occurring outside of the safe, sustainable zone.
Despite accounting for only 16 percent of the global population, high-income countries (according to World Bank classifications) were collectively responsible for 74% of that excess use.
This excess useful resource exploitation was led by the U.S. (which accounted for 27% of the surplus) and followed by EU countries and the United Kingdom, which together accounted for 25% of global extra useful resource consumption.
Aside from highlighting the global inequality of resource over-exploitation, the findings show that raw material consumption must fall dramatically if the world is to have any chance of addressing environmental crises.
