The top 10 percent of the world’s wealthiest individuals are reportedly responsible for a significant portion of environmental damage. Scientists have now assigned a monetary value to this impact.
While valuing the environment is challenging, and some researchers argue that nature’s worth transcends its utility to humanity, quantifying it financially can be useful, especially in terms that resonate with the affluent.
This approach has been undertaken by environmental scientists Inge Schrijver, Rutger Hoekstra, and Paul Behrens from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Their calculations suggest that the top 10 percent of global consumers owe trillions for their environmental footprint.
This is particularly relevant as Elon Musk has recently been declared the world’s first trillionaire.
Schrijver and her team state in a new peer-reviewed paper that they aim to highlight the unique responsibility of the wealthiest segment of society and show potential revenue from their environmental dues. They estimate these damages to be between $1.7 and $5.7 trillion annually, or $2,300 to $7,500 per person, based on 2017 US dollars.
This amount exceeds international funding gaps for climate and biodiversity. Targeted environmental taxes on this group could fund essential transitions to prevent environmental collapse and improve lower-income households’ quality of life.
For example, even conservative estimates for the US and China’s top decile could each fill a $675 billion gap in biodiversity protection funding by 2030. Mid-level estimates for the US’s top 10 percent exceed the $993 billion required annually to meet COP30 targets by 2035.
The researchers began calculating this substantial debt by examining the consumption-based ‘footprints’ of the wealthiest 10 percent using data from 2017, which is the latest available. This analysis covered carbon dioxide emissions, biodiversity loss, and displacement of nitrogen, phosphorus, and freshwater.
Next, they used the Environmental Prices Handbook 2024 to assign monetary values to these environmental damages, reflecting the loss of value to human society, adjusted to 2017 US dollars to align with the footprint data.
Country-specific results varied significantly. Schrijver and her team found that biodiversity loss, accounting for 47–56 percent of the total, and climate change, making up 36–45 percent, are the largest components of the global ‘damage bill’ attributed to the wealthiest 10 percent.
In the US, the top 10 percent, who represent the largest portion of the global top decile, faced bills ranging from $19k to $63k, constituting 6–20 percent of their income, or 0.8–3 percent of their wealth. These individuals consistently had the highest global ‘debt’ according to the estimates.
Conversely, India’s top 10 percent received bills between $410 and $1.4k, representing 0.8–2.8 percent of their incomes, or 0.2–0.5 percent of their wealth. “The difference in the bill between countries reflects the inequalities in consumption and emissions,” the researchers write.
While environmental taxes may not be a complete solution to global climate and biodiversity crises, Schrijver and her team argue that funding must originate somewhere, and this could be a crucial step toward more sustainable consumption patterns.
Related: Almost 30% of Us Face 5x More Heat-Drought Extremes by End of Century
“These costs highlight the mitigation responsibility of the top 10 percent and illustrate the potential revenue of environmental taxes if the polluter-pays principle is adopted,” Schrijver and team conclude.
The research is published in Communications Sustainability.
