11-05-2025
Climate justice in focus: How the wealthy fuel extreme weather through consumption and investments
A new study has found that the richest 10% of people are responsible for two-thirds of global warming since 1990. But as debate swirls over who should bear the cost of climate change, the study's lead author, Sarah Schöngart, says understanding how responsibility is calculated is just as important as the headline figure.
A new study released this week has quantified what many have long suspected: the world's wealthiest people are responsible for the majority of global warming since 1990 that causes increases in climate extremes, such as heatwaves and droughts.
Published in Nature Climate Change on Wednesday, 7 May 2025, the research reveals that the richest 10% of the global population are responsible for two-thirds of the warming that has occurred since 1990, a finding that sharpens the debate over climate justice and who should bear the costs of a heating planet.
What sets this study apart is not just the scale of the numbers, but how it traces those emissions. The authors, led by Sarah Schöngart of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, used advanced climate models to link emissions from different income groups directly to the frequency and intensity of extreme events — like heatwaves and drought — around the world.
'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,' said Schöngart, an alumna of the 2024 Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP), who is currently associated with ETH Zurich, a top science and technology university in Switzerland
'We found that wealthy emitters play a major role in driving climate extremes, which provides strong support for climate policies that target the reduction of their emissions.'
How the top 10% are contributing
The study finds that the top 10% of global earners contributed 65% of the increase in global mean temperature since 1990 — which is six-and-a-half times their share of the world's population.
Their impact comes from two main sources:
Personal consumption: Frequent flying and luxury travel, driving large or luxury vehicles, living in bigger homes that require more energy, and consuming more goods and services that generate emissions.
Financial investments: They also contribute to global warming by investing in or owning companies and industries that emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, such as fossil fuel production, manufacturing, and other high-pollution sectors.
Not just about private jets
It's long been known that the rich pollute more — a 2022 study found that the top 10% of global earners were responsible for nearly half of all carbon emissions in 2019, while the poorest half accounted for just one-tenth. But this new study goes further.
Using advanced climate models, the researchers traced not only emissions from personal consumption — such as frequent flights, large homes, and high-end goods — but also from financial investments. The study uses a 'mixed ownership' approach: most emissions are attributed to consumers, but emissions from capital formation in productive sectors (like energy, steel, and cement) are attributed to firm owners and shareholders, not just end consumers.
Is it fair to calculate investments?
Some might argue that fossil fuel companies provide energy and services that society relies on, so is it fair to assign responsibility to investors? Schöngart told Daily Maverick that this was a matter of how national accounts separated flows across institutional sectors — the government, households, and investment.
'The accounting method for allocating emissions is a mixed ownership approach, meaning direct emissions, e.g. household heating, are attributed to consumers while all emissions in productive sectors, e.g. in producing and selling a T-shirt, are divided between consumers and shareholders,' said Schöngart.
In other words, when a fossil fuel company emits carbon, responsibility is shared between those who use its products and those who profit from its operations. As Schöngart puts it: 'You can think of investment as the investments embedded in gross fixed capital formation across all productive sectors of the economy (e.g. in building factories, buying machines).'
She explained that their study was based on models and data from Lucas Chancel's 2022 study on global carbon inequality, which uses a 'mixed ownership' approach that reflected both consumption and ownership of productive assets.
Chancel's research highlighted that, to mitigate climate change fairly and effectively, it was necessary to look beyond just what people bought and used, and also consider the pollution caused by the companies and investments that wealthier people owned. Policies targeting asset-related emissions could be an important way to reduce carbon pollution, especially by the wealthiest people.
This approach is important because, as Oxfam has reported, the emissions linked to billionaires' investments can be up to 70% of their total carbon footprint — sometimes exceeding their direct lifestyle emissions by orders of magnitude. For example, a billionaire's investment emissions can rival those of entire countries like France or Argentina.
Real world impact
The study shows that emissions from the top 10% wealthiest people contributed seven times more than the global average to the increase in the most extreme heat events, and six times more to Amazon droughts. In the United States and China, the emissions of the wealthiest led to a two- to threefold increase in heat extremes across already vulnerable regions.
'If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50% of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990,' says co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, who leads the Integrated Climate Impacts Research Group at IIASA. 'Addressing this imbalance is crucial for fair and effective climate action.'
How this compares at home
The global study's main finding — that the wealthiest people are responsible for a disproportionate share of emissions and climate impacts — holds true in South Africa too. South Africa's richest households have far larger carbon footprints than the average citizen, mirroring the global pattern.
However, South Africa's emissions profile is different to many other countries. As Professor Harro von Blottnitz, from UCT's Energy Systems Research Group points out, most of our emissions come from extraction and production for export, rather than domestic consumption.
'In that sense, the wealthiest 10% of South Africans may be similar to the global rich, but the emissions linked to their lifestyles can often occur elsewhere — such as in China or Europe, or through international flights — rather than inside South Africa,' he said. 'Meanwhile, much of what's emitted here actually supports consumption in other countries.'
He also notes that South Africa's heavy-emitting industries were more publicly owned than privately owned, and that private capital had shifted over the past two decades from energy-intensive sectors into luxury goods, which could still carry a hidden carbon footprint.
The study doesn't assign moral blame, but it does provide a framework for understanding climate accountability.
Schöngart and her co-authors write: 'Quantifying the link between wealth disparities and climate impacts can assist in the discourse on climate equity and justice.' DM
