Social inequality is reflected in the climate crisis

The report, entitled ‘Climate Equality: A Planet at 99 Percent’, is based on scientific evidence* linking increases in greenhouse gas emissions to rising private incomes and prosperity.

This is due to factors such as increased air traffic, larger homes and the overall increase in climate-damaging consumption, which in extreme cases also includes luxury villas, mega yachts and private jets.

“Through their excessive consumption, the rich and super-rich are fueling the climate crisis, which threatens the livelihoods of billions of people with heat waves, droughts and floods, especially in the low-income countries of the Global South,” said Manuel Schmitt of Oxfam.

Key findings of the report:

• The consumption behavior of the richest one percent, made up of 77 million people, caused about 16 percent of global emissions in 2019 – more than twice as much as the consumption behavior of the poorer half of the world’s population and more than the emissions from all roads. transport worldwide.

• The richest ten percent of the world’s population were responsible for about half of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

Oxfam called for the introduction of new taxes on climate-damaging companies and on the assets and incomes of the super-rich.

*Data comes from the Stockholm Environment Institute, among others, based on information from the Global Carbon Atlas, the World Inequality Database, the Penn World Tables on Income (PWT) and figures from the World Bank. In 2019, people with an annual income of more than 140,000 dollars (the equivalent of almost 138,000 euros) were among the richest percentage of the world’s population.