Ageing society in developed countries challenges carbon mitigation

Heran Zheng, Yin Long, Richard Wood (), Daniel Moran, Zengkai Zhang (), Jing Meng, Kuishuang Feng (), Edgar Hertwich and Dabo Guan
Additional contact information
Heran Zheng: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Yin Long: University of Tokyo
Richard Wood: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Daniel Moran: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Zengkai Zhang: Tianjin University
Jing Meng: University College London
Kuishuang Feng: University of Maryland
Edgar Hertwich: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Dabo Guan: University College London

Nature Climate Change, 2022, vol. 12, issue 3, 241-248

Abstract: Abstract Populations in developed countries are ageing. However, the impact of senior citizens’ consumption on global carbon mitigation is poorly understood. Here we find that senior citizens have played a leading role in driving up GHG emissions in the past decade and are on the way to becoming the largest contributor. Considering the greenhouse gas footprint of household consumption across age groups in 32 developed countries, the senior contribution to national total consumption-based emissions increased from 25.2% to 32.7% between 2005 and 2015. Seniors in the United States and Australia have the highest per capita footprint, twice the Western average. The trend is mainly due to changes in expenditure patterns of seniors. The increasing carbon footprint of senior citizens will probably drive domestic production yet have limited effects on international carbon leakage. The demographic change poses more challenges in local mitigation and calls for deeper public mitigation efforts.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01302-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:12:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1038_s41558-022-01302-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-022-01302-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().