World's wealthiest 10 per cent responsible for two-thirds of global warming since 1990: Study

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One per cent of the world's wealthiest are responsible for a fifth of the global warming seen since 1990, while ten per cent are responsible for two-thirds of global warming, a new study has found.

Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the study directly links climate change to personal lifestyle and investment choices of high-income individuals, according to researchers.

Further, one per cent of the wealthiest were found to have contributed 26 times the global average to increases in 1-in-a-100-year heat extremes in a month.

"Our study shows that extreme climate impacts are not just the result of abstract global emissions, instead we can directly link them to our lifestyle and investment choices, which in turn are linked to wealth," lead author Sarah Schoengart, currently associated with ETH Zurich, Switzerland, said.

Findings shed a new light on climate injustice and inequality in emissions related to incomes, and show how the consumption and investments of wealthy people disproportionately impact the world's weather, the authors said.

Tropical regions, including the Amazon, southeast Asia, and southern Africa -- all of which historically contributed the least to the world's emissions -- experience especially severe impacts of climate change, the team said.

Evidence from the study on how emissions from wealthy individuals drive climate extremes provide a "strong support for climate policies that target the reduction of their emissions", Schoengart added.

Making rich individual polluters pay can also help provide much needed support for adaptation and loss and damage in vulnerable countries, according to the researchers.

For the analysis, the team combined economic data and climate models, which helped them trace emissions from varied income groups around the world and assess their contributions to specific climate extremes, such as heat extremes.

"We find that two-thirds (one-fifth) of warming is attributable to the wealthiest 10 per cent (one per cent), meaning that individual contributions are 6.5 (20) times the average per capita contribution," the authors wrote.

They also found that emissions from 10 per cent of the wealthiest in the US and China, each led to a two-to-threefold increase in heat extremes across the world's vulnerable regions.

"If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 per cent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990," co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a research group leader at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria.

"Addressing this imbalance is crucial for fair and effective climate action," Schleussner said.

Stressing the importance of emissions while making financial investments, the authors argue that targeting the financial flows and portfolios of high-income individuals could yield substantial climate benefits.

Schleussner said, "Climate action that doesn't address the outsize responsibilities of the wealthiest members of society, risks missing one of the most powerful levers we have to reduce future harm."

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