We know from international studies that, far from the clean and green image we have of ourselves, Canada has among the highest ecological impacts in the world. At 7.6 hectares per capita, Canada's ecological footprint is the third largest in the world ã tied with Finland and following the United States and the United Arab Emirates as the worst offenders.
There have been a number of studies in Canada that look at the relative environmental impact of various sectors of the economy but none that show the fairly direct intersection between climate change and income inequality. This study breaks new ground on this front: it is the first study to look at the size of Canadians' ecological footprint by income categories, and it finds that the ecological footprint of high-income Canadian households is substantially greater than that of everyone else. Canadians at every income level are contributing to global warming. Even low-income Canadians have a greater impact on the environment than most of the world's population. Yet, this study provides conclusive evidence that because higher income households consume more and travel more, they have a greater impact on the environment. The study finds:
In one of those classic conclusions that seems obvious as soon as it is stated, it turns out that Canadians' ecological impact is not a function of their existence on the planet, but rather is a function of their consumption. Not surprisingly, the more one consumes, the greater one's impact on the planet; and the greater one's income, the greater one's consumption.
This study is based on pathbreaking research into the relationship between householdincome and environmental impact by former Statistics Canada economist and statistician Hans Messinger. In the first section, economist Hugh Mackenzie and environmentalistRick Smith summarize Messinger's technical findings and put those findings into a social, economic, and political context. The second section presents Hans Messinger's technical analysis and conclusions.
This study raises new and important questions for policy makers considering ways to reduce Canada's ecological footprint and contribute to the fight against global warming. We now recognize that global warming is directly linked to human behaviour. As data comparing Canada and other nations demonstrate, wealthier nations tend to have a greater impact than poorer nations. This study demonstrates that, within Canada, the consumption decisions of higher-income households have a substantially greater impact than those of lower-income households.
While it is evident that all Canadians must make significant efforts to reduce our ecological footprint, it would be a mistake to base policy decisions on the assumption that the underlying drivers of our excessively large ecological footprint are democratically distributed. A strategy that ignores the underlying relationship between ecological impact and income threatens to achieve the worst of all policy worlds: an ineffective strategy that has a substantial negative distributional impact. In short, if we fail to incorporate differences in environmental impact that are systematically related to income, we risk creating an ineffective policy that has the side effect of imposing disproportionate costs on the low- and moderate-income Canadians who have contributed the least to the problems we are trying to address.
In a world where size really does matter, the technical findings in this study open the vault on who Canada's biggest household polluters are ã and why. The technical part of this study looks at Canadians' households, and breaks these households into deciles (slices of 10%) to see if there is a difference between high-, middle- and low-income households' consumption patterns and their corresponding ecological footprint. The findings reveal that the consumption of high-income Canadians is having a very real and damaging effect on the environment. The richest 10% of Canadian households are leaving behind an ecological footprint of 12.4 hectares per capita. To put that finding in context, their per capita ecological footprint is 66% higher than the national average.
The Canadian national average ecological footprint is 7.5 hectares per capita. The bottom 60% of Canadian households are leaving behind an ecological footprint that is below this national average. There is a wide gap between the richest and poorest 10% of Canadian households. The ecological footprint of the richest 10% of Canadians is nearly two-and-a-half times that of the poorest 10%.
This study breaks down the ecological footprint of Canadian households into five consumption categories: food, housing, mobility, goods, and services. The results show that the ecological footprint of high-income Canadian households is substantially larger than that of the rest of Canadians in every category except food. In ecological footprint terms, it turns out that food is the great equalizer. In every other consumption category, the ecological footprint associated with consumption increases as income increases. For about 70% of Canadians, food is the most significant contributor to their household's ecological footprint. It is only for the highest-income 30% of Canadian households that the housing footprint exceeds the food footprint. And indeed, it is only for the richest 10% of households that housing rises to a level significantly above that of food.
Through most of the income range, the housing footprint has the second-weakest relationship to income. The exception is for the richest 10%, where the housing footprint is nearly 50% greater than the next highest income 10% (the 9th decile). For mobility and goods and services, the size of the ecological footprint increases steadily throughout the income range, although even with that steady rise, there is still a jump in the neighbourhood of 50% in the size of the ecological footprint between the 9th and 10th income deciles.
For lower-income households ã the households in which the poorest 20% of Canadians live ã food and housing account for more than 70% of the ecological footprint. Even at median income levels (middle incomes), these two consumption categories account for nearly 60% of the households' total footprint. In the richest 10% of households ã even accounting for the large jump in the size of the housing footprint between the 9th decile and the 10th decile ã food and housing account for only 45% of the total footprint. For low-and-moderate-income Canadians, much of their ecological footprint is associated with the consumption of basic necessities.
The biggest gaps between the poorest 10% and the richest 10% are in: mobility, where the richest 10% has a footprint nearly nine times the size of the footprint of the poorest 10%; goods, where the ratio is 3.75 times; and services, where the ratio is 2.7 times.
Mobility ã all forms of travel ã has the most powerful relationship to income throughout the income scale.
As the chart below confirms, Canadians' ecological footprint associated with food consumption demonstrates very little variability by income class. In every other consumption category, however, there is a significant degree of variation between the poorest 10% and the richest 10%. There is also, notably, a big difference within the richest 20% of Canadian households (the difference between the 9th income decile and the 10th income decile).
In housing, mobility, and consumption of goods and services, the richest 10% of Canadian households is responsible for an ecological footprint between 1.75 times and 2.5 times the average footprint of middle-income households (the middle 20%).
It would be a mistake to interpret these findings as rationale for exempting low- and middle-income Canadian households from measures intended to support Canada's climate change objectives. The average ecological footprint of the poorest 10% of Canadian households is 5.0 hectares. That is three times the average ecological footprint in China and more than seven times the average ecological footprint in India. Indeed, the gap between the lowest-income households in Canada and the average ecological footprint in China is roughly 3:1. That is greater than the gap between the richest 10% and poorest 10% of households in Canada.
So what does all this mean? Ten years after Canada signed onto the Kyoto Accord, the question of how this nation should respond to global environmental change has finally moved to political centre stage. With what passes in politics for breathtaking speed, the middle ground in the debate has shifted dramatically. At the start of 2006, the semi-official policy of a newly-elected federal government was to deny global warming science and push it to the political fringe. Much has changed in a very short period of time. Global warming as a phenomenon is no longer credibly in dispute. Nor is the contention that substantial changes will be required in Canadian society ã and in the Canadian economy ã if Canada is to make serious inroads into reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The link between consumption and global impact is also accepted without question. Part of the political consensus that has emerged on the issue involves an acceptance that as citizens of a wealthy, consumer-oriented society, Canadians contribute disproportionately to the global warming phenomenon and must expect to contribute disproportionately to the solution. And yet little attention has been paid to this aspect of Canadian households' collective responsibility for global warming.
Indeed, the implicit message in the One Tonne Challenge ã the former federal government's advertising attempt to get Canadians involved in greenhouse gas reduction ã was that all Canadians are equally responsible for global warming. The findings in this study indicate the burden of proof lies heavily at the feet of the richest Canadians among us and public policy should reflect that imbalance.
These findings are significant for the design of Canadian policy. They suggest that policies aimed at cleaning up Canadians' environmental act should take explicit account of the differences in environmental impact by income class. Policies that ignore this reality are likely to have the unintended effect of exacerbating income inequality and hampering Canada's efforts to reduce its ecological footprint. Policies that fail to account for differences in ecological footprint by income class will undoubtedly be less successful in meeting environmental objectives than policies that reflect this reality.
The findings in this study on housing and household income should also influence Canadian policy makers. Low- and lower-middle income Canadian households are far more likely to rent rather than own their housing. As tenants, they are generally not in a position to make decisions with respect to the energy efficiency of their homes because they are not responsible for the capital investments required to give effect to those decisions. In many cases, tenants are not even in a position to control the temperature in their rented homes. Since renters lack such controls over their energy consumption, purely market-based measures will have little impact in the rental housing sector. Because energy costs are generally incurred by landlords and passed through to tenants, whatever economic incentives are created by market measures in the rental housing market will generally be created at the wrong place. And to the extent that landlords are forced to make environmental improvements, they will simply pass the cost on to their tenants by raising their rents ã a practice that would exacerbate income inequality in Canada and unfairly penalize lower-income households.
Mobility is another area in which differences in footprints by household income will be significant for policymaking. The gap in the size of the ecological footprint between the poorest and richest 10% of Canadian households is far greater ã nearly nine times ã than it is for any other consumption category. This is largely attributable to higher-income households' use of private cars, vans and trucks (their footprint here is 12 times greater than the poorest 10%) and passenger air travel (four times more). Policies to influence the impact of mobility on Canada's ecological footprint will fail unless they address the consumption patterns of higher-income Canadians.
The practical problems associated with the use of market measures are particularly acute for air travel, which is generally either exempted from or given special treatment under fuel tax regimes on the grounds that airlines will simply avoid the taxes by purchasing their fuel supplies at foreign destination airports. In the absence of international actions to create market incentives for conservation in the airline industry, it is difficult to see how government could use economic instruments to bring about change in that industry.
There are significant differences in environmental impact among Canadian families with different income levels. Just as higher-income nations tend to impose a greater burden on the environment than lower-income nations, higher-income households in Canada impose a greater burden on the environment than lower-income households. A policy response to global warming cannot be effective if it ignores this reality. Not only will a response that ignores significant differences in environmental impact by income class be less effective, it will serve to exacerbate income inequality in Canada.