Carbon Inequality

Carbon Inequality

The (unequal) growth of wealth and the rise of material living standards over the last 200 years came hand in hand with an exponentially increasing use of biocapacity and particularly greenhouse gas emissions (23). Today we are in the midst of a human-made climate crisis (the concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere is the highest in the last 800,000 years) and of the sixth great mass extinction (up to a million animal and plant species will be pushed to the brink of extinction within the next few decades by human impact). The unequal responsibility for carbon emissions is an important form of resource inequality: the richer a country or an individual, the higher the use of physical resources that lead to carbon emissions. The Figure shows the cumulative historical responsibility for excess carbon emissions by world regions (i.e the sum of emissions above an equal per capita amount)). 92% is caused by high-income countries of the Global North.  (24)

Despite environmental policies, movements and growing public awareness, carbon inequality has increased. The so-called “dinosaur graph” shows the unequal patterns of growing carbon emissions in recent decades. While the 50% poorest are only responsible for 6% of the total carbon emissions growth from 1990-2015, the richest 10% are responsible for 46% of the emissions growth in this period.(25)

With respect to current carbon emissions, the richest 1% of the world’s population emits more than twice the combined share of the poorest 50%. Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate target of 1.5°C requires reducing emissions to a per capita lifestyle footprint of about 2-2.5 tCO2e by 2030, which means that the richest 1% would need to reduce their current per capita emissions by at least a factor of 30 and the richest 10% by a factor of 10, while the per capita emissions of the poorest 50% could still increase on average by a factor of three (27). To put it in a nutshell, inequality of income, wealth and carbon emissions are related and the climate crisis is essentially a crisis of inequality.