Al Jazeera:
The wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s people are responsible for two-thirds of the global warming since 1990, according to researchers.
The way in which the rich consume and invest has substantially increased the risk of heatwaves and droughts, wrote the researchers of a study published on Wednesday in the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
This is the first study to quantify the impact of concentrated private wealth on extreme climate events.
“We link the carbon footprints of the wealthiest individuals directly to real-world climate impacts,” lead author Sarah Schoengart, a scientist at the public university of ETH Zurich, told the AFP news agency. “It’s a shift from carbon accounting toward climate accountability.”
Compared with the global average, for example, the richest 1 percent contributed 26 times more to once-a-century heatwaves and 17 times more to droughts in the Amazon, according to the study.
Emissions from the wealthiest 10 percent in China and the United States – which together account for nearly half of global carbon pollution – each led to a two- to threefold rise in heat extremes.
