If we gave everyone a decent standard of living, could we sustain it?

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Could we meet the needs of everyone on the planet without stripping the Earth of all its resources? A paper in this week’s Nature Sustainability says: kind of.

It should be possible to meet the basic physical needs of everyone on the planet without using up physical resources too quickly. But it wouldn’t be possible to extend a first-world standard of living to everyone without needing “a level of resource use that is two-six times the sustainable level,” researcher Daniel O’Neill and his colleagues report. Only a drastic improvement in efficiency would allow the planet to manage this higher standard of living.

O’Neill and his colleagues looked at the resources that humans use a lot of and that are critical for the planet’s health: things like fresh water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Exceeding the “planetary boundaries” of these resources risks global environmental stability—and we’re not doing well on that front.