JINAN,
China, Nov. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently,
the Weihai Institute for Interdisciplinary Research team of
Shandong University, in
collaboration with multiple research teams both domestically and
internationally, has made advancements in sustainable consumption.
The related achievement, titled "Keeping the global consumption
within the planetary boundaries," has been published online
in Nature as a research paper. Professors Tian
Peipei and Zhong Honglin from
Shandong University are the
co-first authors of the paper, while Professors Feng Kuishuang and Sun Laixiang from the
University of Maryland, Professor
Zhang Ning from Shandong University, and Professor
Klaus Hubacek from the University of
Groningen are the co-corresponding authors. Major contributors to
the paper include Professor Liu Yu
from Peking University, doctoral student Chen Xiangjie from the
University of Maryland, and
Shao Xuan, a graduate of
Shandong University. Shandong University is the first affiliation
listed for the paper.
Over the past century, the sharp rise in global demand for goods
and services has triggered unsustainable resource extraction and
production expansion, leading to many environmental indicators
surpassing the safe operating space of the Earth system (planetary
boundaries). However, the distribution of responsibility for
exceeding planetary boundaries is uneven among different
populations. Income and wealth inequality have resulted in
significant disparities in global consumption and environmental
footprints. Understanding and quantifying the ecological footprints
of consumers at different expenditure levels globally, along with
their responsibilities for breaching planetary boundaries, and
proposing targeted mitigation measures are crucial issues at the
forefront of sustainable development research.
Based on a self-constructed database of global consumption
encompassing 201 expenditure levels and 168 countries, the research
team depicted the inequality in six major environmental footprints
(carbon, land, nitrogen, phosphorus, water, and biodiversity) of
global consumption. They quantified the responsibility of
ecological footprints at different consumption levels for breaching
key global planetary boundary indicators and proposed mitigation
measures for high consumers' global environmental pressures.
The study revealed that the per capita environmental footprint
of the top 10% of global consumers is 4.2 to 77 times that of the
bottom 10%. Between 51% and 91% of planetary boundary breach
responsibilities can be attributed to the top 20% of global
consumers. If the top 20% of global consumers adopt the lowest
impact consumption levels and patterns within their groups, global
environmental pressures could be reduced by 25% to 53%. In this
scenario, focusing solely on actions in the food and services
sectors would be adequate to restore land system changes and
biosphere integrity within their respective planetary boundary
budgets. The research underscores the urgent need for high
consumers to sensibly reduce consumption and enhance consumption
efficiency to address global planetary boundary transgressions
effectively.
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SOURCE Shandong University