PERSPECTIVE
Scientists
’
warning on af
uence
Thomas Wiedmann
1
✉
, Manfred Lenzen
2
, Lorenz T. Keyßer
3
&Julia K. Steinberger
4
For over half a century, worldwide growth in af
uence has continuously increased resourceuse and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through bettertechnology. The af
uent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impactsand are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions. Wesummarise the evidence and present possible solution approaches. Any transition towardssustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technologicaladvancements. However, existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumptionexpansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibitsnecessary societal change.
R
ecent scientists
’
warnings con
rm alarming trends of environmental degradation fromhuman activity, leading to profound changes in essential life-sustaining functions of planetEarth
–
. The warnings surmise that humanity has failed to
nd lasting solutions to thesechanges that pose existential threats to natural systems, economies and societies and call foraction by governments and individuals.The warnings aptly describe the problems, identify population, economic growth and af
u-ence as drivers of unsustainable trends and acknowledge that humanity needs to reassess the roleof growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of af
uence
. However, they fall short of clearly identifying the underlying forces of overconsumption and of spelling out the measures that areneeded to tackle the overwhelming power of consumption and the economic growth paradigm
.This perspective synthesises existing knowledge and recommendations from the scienti
ccommunity. We provide evidence from the literature that consumption of af
uent householdsworldwide is by far the strongest determinant and the strongest accelerator of increases of globalenvironmental and social impacts. We describe the systemic drivers of af
uent overconsumptionand synthesise the literature that provides possible solutions by reforming or changing economicsystems. These solution approaches range from reformist to radical ideas, including degrowth,eco-socialism and eco-anarchism. Based on these insights, we distil recommendations for furtherresearch in the
nal section.
Af
uence as a driver of environmental and social impacts
The link between consumption and impacts
. There exists a large body of literature in which therelationship between environmental, resource and social impacts on one hand, and possibleexplanatory variables on the other, is investigated. We review and summarise those studies thatholistically assess the impact of human activities, in the sense that impacts are not restricted to
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y
OPEN
1
Sustainability Assessment Program, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
2
ISA, School of Physics, TheUniversity of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
3
Institute for Environmental Decisions, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zürich,Zürich, Switzerland.
4
Sustainability Research Institute (SRI), School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
✉
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS| (2020)11:3107|https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y|www.nature.com/naturecommunications
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ( ) : , ;
the home, city, or territory of the individuals, but instead arecounted irrespective of where they occur. Such an assessmentperspective is usually referred to as consumption-basedaccounting, or footprinting
.Allocating environmental impacts to consumers is consistentwith the perspective that consumers are the ultimate drivers of production, with their purchasing decisions setting in motion aseries of trade transactions and production activities, rippling along complex international supply-chain networks
. However,allocating impacts to consumers does not necessarily imply asystemic causal understanding of which actor should be heldmost responsible for these impacts. Responsibility may lie withthe consumer or with an external actor, like the state, or instructural relations between actors. Scholars of sustainableconsumption have shown that consumers often have little controlover environmentally damaging decisions along supply chains
,however they often do have control over making a consumptiondecision in the
rst place. Whilst in Keynesian-type economicsconsumer demand drives production, Marxian political econom-ics as well as environmental sociology views the economy assupply dominated
. In this paper, we highlight the measurementof environmental impacts of consumption, while noting thatmultiple actors bear responsibility.Holistic studies of the environmental or social consequences of consumption usually involve the use of life-cycle assessment orinput-output analysis that do not only account for direct (on-site,within-territory) but importantly also include indirect impactsoccurring along global and complete supply chains
. The use of such methods is important, because failing to detect theoutsourcing of indirect impacts (also called spill overs or leakage)has the potential to seriously undermine global environmentalabatement efforts, e.g. on climate change
.A signi
cant proportionality between consumption and impactexists for a large range of environmental, resource and socialindicators. The implications of consumption on scarce energy resources emerged already in the 1970s and was con
rmed by many consumption-based analyses on indicators as varied as CO
2
emissions, raw materials, air pollution, biodiversity, nitrogenemissions, scarce water use or energy
. Many of these studiesemployed multiple regression or similar techniques, yielding clearevidence for our
rst
nding: that consumption is by far thestrongest determinant of global impacts, dwar
ng other socio-economic
–
demographic factors such as age, household size,quali
cation or dwelling structure
–
. Whilst the strength of theproportionality between consumption and impact decreasesslightly towards higher incomes (measured by so-called elasti-cities), consumption was found to be a consistently positivedriver. In other words, the impact intensity of consumptiondecreases, but absolute impacts increase towards higher con-sumption. Absolute decoupling, let alone an inverted-U-typeKuznets relationship, does not occur from a consumption-basedaccounting perspective
.For some social indicators, causal associations betweenconsumption and impact are weak or non-existent. For example,withdrawing consumption from countries with unequal wages,child labour, corruption or severe occupational hazards may notin
uence those conditions, and might even exacerbate socialproblems. Footprint studies on these indicators neverthelesscharacterise consumers of commodities from socially problematicorigins as being implicated with detrimental impacts
–
.
Trends
. Many indicators of global environmental and socialimpacts have been monitored over time, and time series dataexist
. Numerous global studies decomposing time series of footprints of consumption into drivers of trends have beencarried out over the past decades, for example on greenhouse-gasemissions, energy use, water use, materials or mercury emissions.These studies routinely decompose global impact trends intoeffects due to changes in a number of factors, such as technology,the input structure of production, the product mix in consumerdemand, the level of per-capita consumption or population
.The majority of studies agree that by far the major drivers of global impacts are technological change and per-capita consump-tion
. Whilst the former acts as a more or less strong retardant,the latter is a strong accelerator of global environmental impact.Remarkably, consumption (and to a lesser extent population)growth have mostly outrun any bene
cial effects of changes intechnology over the past few decades. These results hold for theentire world
as well as for numerous individualcountries
–
. Figure 1 shows the example of changes inglobal-material footprint and greenhouse-gas emissions com-pared to GDP over time. The overwhelming evidence fromdecomposition studies is that globally, burgeoning consumptionhas diminished or cancelled out any gains brought about by technological change aimed at reducing environmental impact
.Furthermore, low-income groups are rapidly occupying middle- and high-income brackets around the world. This canpotentially further exacerbate the impacts of mobility-relatedconsumption, which has been shown to disproportionately increase with income (i.e. the elasticity is larger than one
).This means that if consumption is not addressed in future effortsfor mitigating environmental impact, technological solutions willface an uphill battle, in that they not only have to bring aboutreductions of impact but will also need to counteract the effects of growing consumption and af
uence
.To avoid further deterioration and irreversible damage tonatural and societal systems, there will need to be a global andrapid decoupling of detrimental impacts from economic activity.Whilst a number of countries in the global North have recently managed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions while still growing their economies
, it is highly unlikely that such decoupling willoccur more widely in the near future, rapidly enough at globalscale and for other environmental impacts
. This is becauserenewable energy, electri
cation, carbon-capturing technologies
0.50.70.91.11.31.51.71.92.12.31970 1980 1990(=1)2000 2010 2020
Global GDP Global MF Global CO
2
FFI
Fig. 1 Relative change in main global economic and environmentalindicators from 1970 to 2017.
Shown is how the global material footprint(MF, equal to global raw material extraction) and global CO
2
emissionsfrom fossil-fuel combustion and industrial processes (CO
2
FFI) changedcompared with global GDP (constant 2010 USD). Indexed to 1 in 1990. Datasources: https://www.resourcepanel.org/global-material-
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and even services all have resource requirements, mostly in theform of metals, concrete and land
. Rising energy demand andcosts of resource extraction, technical limitations and reboundeffects aggravate the problem
. It has therefore been arguedthat
“
policy makers have to acknowledge the fact that addressing environmental breakdown may require a direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in the wealthiestcountries
”
17,p.5
. We will address this argument in the sectionon systemic drivers and possible solutions.
International disparities
. In what follows, we will explain why we characterise consumption as af
uence. Inequality is com-monly described by the Gini index, with 0 characterising totalequality (all individuals equal) and 100 representing totalinequality (one individual owning everything). World countries
’
Gini indices of income inequality range between 25 (Scandinavia)and 63 (Southern Africa)
. The world
’
s Gini index of incomeinequality is around 75, higher than the corresponding index of any national population. Simply put, the world as a whole is moreunequal than any individual country.Since income is strongly linked with consumption, andconsumption is in turn linked with impact (see previous section),we can expect existing income inequalities to translate intoequally signi
cant impact inequalities. Indeed, environmental,resource and social impacts are exerted unequally across theworld population. Teixido-Figueras et al.
report that interna-tional Gini coef
cients for CO
2
emissions, material consumptionand net primary productivity (both measured from a productionand consumption perspective) range between 35 and 60. These values mean that the world
’
s top 10% of income earners areresponsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact. Incontrast, the world
’
s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3
–
5% of environmental impact
. These
ndings meanthat environmental impact is to a large extent caused and drivenby the world
’
s rich citizens
. Considering that the lifestyles of wealthy citizens are characterised by an abundance of choice,convenience and comfort, we argue that the determinant anddriver we have referred to in previous sections as consumption, ismore aptly labelled as af
uence.Teixido-Figueras et al.
also
nd that carbon emissions andmaterial use are globally more unequally distributed whenaccounted for as footprints. In contrast to territorial allocations,footprints attribute environmental burdens to the
nal consumer,no matter where the initial environmental pressure has occurred.Here, international trade is responsible for shifting burdens frommostly low-income developing-world producers to high-incomedeveloped-world consumers
. This phenomenon of outsourcing appears to exacerbate global disparities, at least in carbonemissions and material use contexts.
Systemic drivers and possible solutions
As the previous section shows, there is a positive relationshipbetween biophysical resource use and af
uence, as de
ned by income. Adding to this, the most af
uent groups have higherincomes than expenditure, and their saving and investing leads tosubstantial additional environmental impact
. Therefore, anddue to signi
cant inter- and intra-national wealth and incomeinequality
, we differentiate between globally af
uent groups,such as the European Union, and the most wealthy and af
uentgroups within countries, e.g. the <1
–
10% richest income seg-ments
. As quantitative research
shows, highly af
uentconsumers drive biophysical resource use (a) directly throughhigh consumption, (b) as members of powerful factions of thecapitalist class and (c) through driving consumption normsacross the population. The next sections focus on af
uent groupsglobally and on the intra-nationally most wealthy and af
uentsegments (hereafter called super-af
uent).
Reducing overconsumption
. Since the level of consumptiondetermines total impacts, af
uence needs to be addressed by
reducing
consumption, not just greening it
. It is clear thatprevailing capitalist, growth-driven economic systems have notonly increased af
uence since World War II, but have led toenormous increases in inequality,
nancial instability, resourceconsumption and environmental pressures on vital earth supportsystems
. A suitable concept to address the ecological dimensionis the widely established avoid-shift-improve framework outlinedby Creutzig et al.
. Its focus on the end-use service, such asmobility, nutrition or shelter, allows for a multi-dimensionalanalysis of potential impact reductions beyond sole technologicalchange. This analysis can be directed at human need satisfactionor decent living standards
—
an alternative perspective put for-ward for curbing environmental crises
. Crucially, this per-spective allows us to consider different provisioning systems (e.g.states, markets, communities and households) and to differentiatebetween super
uous consumption, which is consumption thatdoes not contribute to needs satisfaction, and necessary con-sumption which can be related to satisfying human needs. Itremains important to acknowledge the complexities surrounding this distinction, as touched upon in the sections on growthimperatives below. Still, empirically, human needs satisfactionshows rapidly diminishing returns with overall consumption
.As implied by the previous section on af
uence as a driver, thestrongest pillar of the necessary transformation is to avoid or toreduce consumption until the remaining consumption level fallswithin planetary boundaries, while ful
lling human needs
.Avoiding consumption means not consuming certain goods andservices, from living space (overly large homes, secondary residences of the wealthy) to oversized vehicles, environmentally damaging and wasteful food, leisure patterns and work patternsinvolving driving and
ying
. This implies reducing expenditureand wealth along
‘
sustainable consumption corridors
’
, i.e.minimum and maximum consumption standards
(Fig. 2).On the technological side, reducing the need for consumption canbe facilitated by changes such as increasing lifespans of goods,telecommunication instead of physical travel, sharing andrepairing instead of buying new, and house retro
tting
.
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Poverty and need: socially unsustainable
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Fig. 2 The safe and just space for humanity.
Sustainable lifestyles aresituated between an upper limit of permissible use (
“
Environmentalceiling
”
) and a lower limit of necessary use of environmental resources(
“
Social foundation
”
) (
gures from ref.
and ref.
combined and adapted).NATURE COMMUNICATIONS | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y
PERSPECTIVE
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