A recent study reveals that the majority of people, regardless of how much they earn, greatly underestimate the personal carbon footprint of the richest members of their society, while overestimating that of the poorest.
This suggests that “most people, including the wealthiest, are largely unaware of the profound inequality in personal carbon footprints within their country,” study co-author Kristian Nielsen, a climate change researcher at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, told Mongabay in an email. “This is likely because many people have a limited understanding of carbon footprints, which products and services most significantly impact people’s carbon footprint, and the specifics of wealthier people’s lifestyles.”
The carbon footprint is often used as a proxy for environmental impact. At an individual level, it’s a measure of how much CO2 an individual produces across their daily activities, from their mode of transportation to the food and clothes they buy. Previous research has shown that the average personal carbon footprint varies widely both between and within countries. In India, for example, the bottom 50% earners have an average personal carbon footprint of 1 metric ton of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per year, while for the top 1%, it’s about 32.4 tons, the study notes. In the U.S., the annual carbon footprint ranges from 9.7 tons for the bottom 50% earners to 269.3 tons for the top 1%.
To find out if people are aware of these inequalities, researchers surveyed 4,000 individuals from Denmark, India, the U.S. and Nigeria. Half of the respondents in each country fell in the top 10% income bracket, and the rest were below that threshold. They were asked to estimate the average personal carbon footprints of people in three income groups within their own country: the bottom 50%, the top 10%, and the top 1% of income.
Across all four countries, most participants significantly underestimated the average carbon footprints for the highest earners, and overestimated those for the bottom half. When the participants were told what the actual carbon footprint figures were across income groups, richer participants perceived the inequality to be much fairer than the rest.
Understanding these perceptions is important because the rich often have an outsized influence on the climate: they not only consume and emit the most, they also influence climate policies, study co-author Ramit Debnath, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., said in a statement. “Due to their greater financial and political influence, most climate policies reflect the interests of the richest in society and rarely involve fundamental changes to their lifestyles or social status,” he said.
The participants’ skewed perceptions also suggest there’s an urgent need to raise awareness about carbon footprint inequality, the researchers write.
“I believe the most important implication is that inequality still features too little in public discussions around who contributes most to causing climate change,” Nielsen said.
Banner image: Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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