The world’s richest people are likely to have already used their fair share of the annual global carbon budget, according to research by international NGO Oxfam.
Based on data from 2019, the anti-poverty charity has estimated that the 77 million “super-rich” people in the global top 1% of earners – whose average income is $310,000 per year – use 2.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide each in just ten days. In contrast, it takes those in the world’s poorest 50% – 3.9 billion people – nearly three years to pollute that much.
According to the global carbon budget estimated by the United Nations Environment Programme, 2.1 tonnes per year is the full individual budget each person can emit by 2030 before breaching 1.5C of global warming.
Oxfam GB’s senior climate justice policy adviser Chiara Liguori said: “The future of our planet is hanging by a thread, yet the super-rich are being allowed to continue to squander humanity’s chances with their lavish lifestyles and polluting investments.”
“Governments need to stop pandering to the richest polluters and instead make them pay their fair share for the havoc they’re wreaking on our planet. Leaders who fail to act are culpable in a crisis that threatens the lives of billions,” she added in a statement.
Billionaires tax
Measures to tax the super-rich to fund climate action have risen up the agenda in recent years. Last year, the Brazilian government used its presidency of the G20 group of big economies to promote a proposal that aims for governments to tax billionaires at least 2% of their wealth.
Economists working on this proposal said it could raise $250 billion a year, which could be used to tackle poverty, hunger and climate change.
G20 leaders agreed at a November leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed” and said that discussions on this would be continued in the G20 and other forums.
Speaking ahead of that summit, Brazil’s climate change secretary Ana Toni told Climate Home the proposal had been “really well received” and had changed the global debate on how to fund climate action. France, South Africa and Spain were among the nations supporting it.
Solidarity levies
The Brazilian government will host the COP30 climate summit in November and is co-chairing with Azerbaijan work on the “Baku to Belem Roadmap”, which will look into how to scale up finance for climate projects and may include measures like a tax on the super-rich and particularly polluting sectors of the economy.
Oxfam calculated, for example, that what it called “fair” taxes on private jets and super-yachts in the UK alone could have raised up to £2 billion ($2.5 billion) in 2023 to help generate funds for climate action.
Separately, a Global Solidarity Levies Taskforce coordinated by France, Kenya and Barbados will also examine ways to raise international funding including taxes on shipping, private air travel, fossil fuels and financial transactions.
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It will announce working groups for each measure by the end of March 2025 and produce preliminary impact assessments by the time of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings in April and final impact assessments by the Financing for Development summit at the end of June.
The taskforce will then aim to get countries to sign up to implement some of these proposals by COP30.
Friederike Roder, director of the taskforce’s secretariat, told Climate Home that Oxfam’s research reinforces the argument that the rich must “contribute their fair share to fund the fight for development and against climate change, especially in the poorest and most vulnerable countries”. “What we need now is action,” she added.
(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Sebastián Rodríguez)
This story was updated after publication to amend data on the income level of the richest 1% and to add Oxfam’s calculation on taxing climate-polluting luxury transport.