National responsibility for ecological breakdown

High income nations primarily responsible for global ecological breakdown.

A recent paper published in Lancet Planet Health by Jason Hickel and colleagues demonstrates that high-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels. The authors conducted a fair-shares assessment of resource use, and show that high-income nations bear the overwhelming responsibility for global ecological breakdown, and therefore owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world.

The research determined countries’ share of responsibility for global excess resource use, both biotic (biomass) and non-biotic (metals, non-metallic minerals, and fossil fuels) from 1970-2017. It found that high-income nations, with 16% of the world population, are responsible for 74% of global excess material use, driven primarily by the USA (27%) and the EU-28 high-income countries (25%). Furthermore, the majority of the ecological pressure from excess consumption in rich nations is outsourced to poorer nations, with such appropriation not only causing ecological damage in poorer nations, but also depleting them of the material resources that they could otherwise use.

(While the analysis found that China is responsible for 15% of global excess material use, this was attributed to a limitation of the study where cumulative overshoot accounting is highly sensitive to the start date of the analysis. Starting in 1970 effectively erased excess resource use that might have happened before this date. For instance, the USA has consumed resources in excess of 8 tonnes per capita per year since at least 1870 (when national records began) and its resource use increased particularly rapidly in the middle of the 20th century, due in large part to infrastructure buildout. By contrast, nations in the Global South that have industrialised more recently are penalised for the same activity because it happened within the analysis period, and during a period of aggregate resource overuse. This issue is particularly evident in the case of China, where infrastructure buildout has occurred primarily since 2000.)

The authors explain that if responsibility for excess resource use were to be calculated in a manner that accounted for asynchronous patterns of industrial development, the responsibility of the USA and EU would likely be substantially higher than their results suggest, and the responsibility of countries in the Global South would probably be lower. The rest of the Global South (i.e., the low-income and middle-income countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) was found in the analysis to be responsible for only 8% of global excess material use.

The authors conclude that high-income nations would need to take the lead in making radical reductions in their resource use to avoid further degradation. Strong legislation on both domestic extraction and material footprints is required to scale down aggregate resource use to sustainable levels. Given existing evidence on the strong coupling between economic growth and resource use, the authors say high-income nations would also need to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches, including abandoning GDP growth as a goal, reducing inequality, and organising the economy around human needs, while scaling down unnecessary commodity production. It is also important to note that there is substantial variation of responsibility within countries, given that rich individuals consume more than poor individuals.

These issues are relevant to the current negotiations on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), where the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities need to frame the Goals and Targets of the GBF, including in the resource mobilization discussions.

- Third World Network

Source: https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lanplh/PIIS2542-5196(22)00044-4.pdf