Rich countries have been robbing the Earth of its natural resources and causing unimaginable damage. A new study has revealed that countries like Australia, Canada, the US, UK and others have been responsible for most of the ecological damage that the Earth has suffered. The study assigned responsibility to 160 countries that have harmed the planet over the past 50 years.

The US alone was responsible for 27 percent of the world’s excessive use of natural resources, while the EU (which included the UK for the period of the study) was responsible for 25 percent. Australia, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and other rich countries were collectively responsible for 22 percent excess use. China is responsible for 15 per cent of global excess material use.

“High income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels,” stated the study published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.

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“These nations need to take the lead in making radical reductions in their resource use to avoid further degradation, which will likely require transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches,” the study added.

In terms of tonnes of overshoot per capita, Australia was the worst with 29.16, followed by Canada with 25.82 and then the US with 23.45. The study found that nearly half of the world’s resources were extracted by countries that had exceeded the limit of their share of the world’s resources. Countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh and 53 others at the same time remained within sustainable limits.

“We were all shocked by the sheer scale of the high-income nations’ contribution to excess resource use,” Prof Jason Hickel of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) told the Guardian.

“We didn’t expect it to be so high. If they are now to achieve sustainable levels, they need to reduce their resource use by about 70% on average from existing levels,” he added.

Also read: ‘This is the time for action’: IPCC report lists out climate solutions

(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)