Total material requirements to provide a decent living standard. Credit: S. Pauliuk / J. A. Vélez-Henao
Today, 1.2 billion people live in poverty. To lift them out of it, an average of about six tons of raw materials are needed per person and year—in particular minerals, fossil fuels, biomass and metal ores. This is the result of a study published inby researchers from the Chair of Sustainable Energy and Material Flow Management at the University of Freiburg.poverty
and were able to show that the areas of nutrition and mobility have a particularly large impact on resource requirements. Dr. Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao, lead author of the study, comments,"The material requirement of six tons per year to afford a person a decent life is small when compared with the resource consumption in wealthy countries. In Germany, for example, it averages 72 and in the U.S. 85 tons per person per year. So a little redistribution could go a long way.
In contrast, housing, hygiene, education, communication, public services and clothing account for a much smaller share of the footprint. Breaking down the footprint of a poverty-free life by resource type, it is composed of 34% non-metallic minerals , 28% fossil fuels, 20% biomass and 18% metal ores.For their study, the researchers also evaluated more than 6,000 different scenarios of how different supply situations and lifestyles affect the raw material requirements of poverty reduction.
On the other hand, the footprint can more than double to as much as 14 tons per year if the person lives in a high-rise concrete building, subsists on a diet of meat and rice, and uses an electric car to get around.