The World’s Richest People Have an Outsized Role in Climate Extremes

The consumption and investments of the wealthiest 10% contribute disproportionately to the emissions that drive heat waves and drought.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02325-x

Nature.com || The world’s richest people are disproportionately responsible for climate impacts such as extreme heat and drought, research shows¹.

Wealthy people contribute to higher emissions by using more energy and buying more things, and through the carbon footprint of their investments. Sarah Schöngart, then at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Laxenburg, Austria, and her colleagues used climate models and statistics to link those emissions to temperature increases, and to trends in extreme heat and drought.

Their calculations suggest that, from 1990 to 2020, the wealthiest 10% of the world’s population was responsible for two-thirds of both the 0.61 °C increase in average global temperature and the 0.83 °C increase in the intensity of extreme heat events during the hottest months. The team estimates that these people contributed six times more to droughts in the Amazon than did the average person.

Their results also reveal inequalities among nations. The wealthiest 10% of people in the United States contribute 17 times more to global warming than the global per-person average, whereas the wealthiest 10% in India contribute just 1.2 times the global average.