How much stuff does it take to not be poor? About 6 tons per year

That’s the average amount of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies per person, researchers calculate in first-of-its-kind study

How much stuff do people need to lead a decent life? It’s a hard, and subjective, question. But researchers have now estimated for the first time what it takes, quantitatively speaking, to keep one person out of abject poverty: about 6 tons per year of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies, researchers report this month in Environmental Science & Technology.

The first-of-its-kind estimate is “a remarkable step forward,” says Stefan Bringezu, an expert in sustainable resource management at the University of Kassel who was not involved with the research. “They shed light on the physical basis of our society and economy in a comprehensive and rather detailed way.” According to Bringezu, the findings contain good news: They suggest that ending poverty can be done without taking an unbearable toll on the planet itself.

The study comes as the United Nations wrestled this week with exactly that daunting challenge. The U.N. is trying to kick-start progress on its Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 grand ambitions that include ending poverty worldwide by 2030, while also preventing environmental degradation and fighting climate change. Fossil fuels get a lot of attention in this debate, but raw materials such as cement, metal, timber, and grain are also important because their production and refining contributes about 23% of carbon emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss.

To make the new estimates, environmental scientists Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao and Stefan Pauliuk of the University of Freiburg and colleagues turned to a common definition of basic living standards created in 2017. The list includes 15 square meters of living space, 2100 calories of food per day for adults, basic appliances such as a washing machine and a modern stove, a phone and laptop, and the means to travel to work or sell their wares.

The researchers calculated the rough amount of raw materials involved in each of these objects and services. From a societal perspective, they looked at two kinds of needs for materials, because they have different implications. The first is very large and essentially one-time investments, such as buying a house. The other is analogous to the ongoing maintenance costs to prevent it from falling into ruin.

The former challenge is large, because ending poverty requires a lot of basic infrastructure, such as building all the needed houses, schools, and roads that allow farmers and villagers to take their wares to market. And building hospitals, for example, that can treat the urban poor. It also includes manufacturing the construction equipment needed for those jobs. All told, these structures require about 43 tons of materials—technically called an “in-use stock”—for each person in currently living in poverty, or 51.6 billion tons of raw materials worldwide.

The second task is enabling poor people to maintain their share of these stocks and to meet daily needs for household life, education, work, and participating in public life, such as recreation. Figuring this amount required more detailed calculations. For food, the total included the biomass of crops as well as the fertilizer and pesticides needed to grow them. Estimating transportation needs involved a mix of modes, including bicycles, cars, buses, and trains, because the goal was a global average.

Maintaining minimum decent living conditions for all 1.2 billion people currently living in abject poverty would take 7.2 billion tons of raw materials per year, the researchers found—or about 6 tons per person every year.

How much is that, actually? This is the question that researchers and policymakers want to answer because providing all the raw materials to end poverty will cost money, require plans, and take a toll on the environment.

One key takeaway, Vélez-Henao and Pauliuk say, is that this new estimate is achievable without ruining the planet. The duo notes that the average ongoing amount of stuff is within the range—between 8 and 14 tons per year—of what previous studies have suggested would be sustainable.

Here's the catch: These studies assume that every person on the planet eventually consumes roughly the same amount of raw materials. So, in terms of what Earth can safely provide, using raw materials to provide a vibrant and comfortable life is a zero-sum game.

And rich countries already use a lot of raw materials. Take the United States and Germany, for example. To maintain their lifestyles, people in these countries require more than 70 tons of raw materials every year per capita—a much bigger share than the 8 to 14 tons per capita for everyone on the planet to have just and sustainable living standards. “This shows you that inequality reduction is so critical” for achieving the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, says Narasimha Rao, an expert in energy and poverty at Yale University.

In addition to lessening the gap, progress can also come from achieving greater efficiency, such as lighter vehicles and more durable products. And the new analysis shows that lifestyle changes—for example, cutting one’s meat consumption in half or taking public transportation—can decrease a person’s material footprint by 9% and 10%, respectively. “You really get a different picture,” Vélez-Henao says. “That impressed me a lot.”

doi: 10.1126/science.adk9666

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