Implications of the Biocultural Ethic for Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 119

For a more precise diagnosis of the agents mainly responsible for global
environmental change, our analysis of Steffen et al. ( 2011 ) conducted with the bio-
cultural ethic's conceptual framework allows us to achieve three core conclusions:

(i) Regarding the temporal and spatial location (or habitat ), the most dramatic
change has taken place since the 1950s in the Northern Hemisphere.

(ii) Regarding the mechanism (or cultural habit) , the main responsible factor is

the growth in affl uence and consumption rates.

(iii) Regarding the social groups (or human co-inhabitants ), societies of developed

countries are those that have most contributed to global environmental change
and, directly and indirectly, to the gestation of the Anthropocene.

With the conceptual framework of the biocultural ethic we are compelled to
further distinguish among the levels of affl uence by different sectors of the popu-
lation. First, at a global scale, intercontinental analyses reveal great disparities in
the proportions of the world population and total wealth (Table 9.2 ). North
America and Europe are the richest continents; they concentrate 54 % of the
global wealth, but have only 15 % of the world's population. On the poorer
extreme, Africa has 10.7 % of the world population but only 1.5 % of the global
wealth. Based on the data provided by Table 9.2 (see columns for the ratios WW/
WP and GDP/WP ), we can estimate that on average, a North American person
participates 52 times more in the global wealth and 23 times more in the global
GDP than an African person.
The fi gures of the intercontinental analysis are still too general, because within
each continent and country there are also great inequalities and hence consumption
differentiation. For example, in the United States of America the richest quintile (20 %
of the population) possesses 84 % of the country's wealth, while the poorest quintile
possesses only 0.1 % of this wealth (Norton and Ariely 2011 ). Furthermore, the rich-
est 1 % of U.S. Americans holds nearly 50 % of the country's wealth. An equivalent
concentration of wealth also is found at the world level.
The World Economic Forum ( 2013 ) reports that the richest 1 % of the world
population owns 50 % of the world's wealth, i.e., 70 million people own US$ 115
trillion (Table 9.3 ). In contrast, the poorest 50 % of the world population owns just

Table 9.2 Percentages of the world's population (WP), wealth (WW), and Gross Domestic
Product (GDP), and WW/WP and GDP/WP ratios (Data based on Davies et al. ( 2007 ))

% World
population (WP)

% World's
wealth (WW)

% World
GDP

Ratio
WW/WP

Ratio
GDP/WP Continent

North America 5.2 27.1 23.9 5.2 4.6

Europe 9.6 26.4 22.8 2.7 2.4

Oceania &
Others

3.1 3.7 5.4 1.2 1.7

Latin America 8.5 6.5 8.5 0.8 1.0

Asia 52.2 29.4 31.1 0.6 0.6

Middle East 9.9 5.1 5.7 0.5 0.6

Africa 10.7 1.5 2.4 0.1 0.2