The world's top 10% income earners are responsible for at least 25% and up to 43% of our environmental impact. ... While technological improvements have helped to reduce emissions and other environmental impacts, the worldwide growth in affluence has consistently outpaced these gains, driving all the impacts back up.
Why does affluence matter for environmental change?
As the previous section shows, there is a positive relationship between biophysical resource use and affluence, as defined by income. Adding to this, the most affluent groups have higher incomes than expenditure, and their saving and investing leads to substantial additional environmental impact38.
What is environmental affluence?
Affluence in environmental science is the abundance of wealth and goods or the consumption of high volumes of goods, particularly those taken from the...
