Global household material use is highly unequal: the top 10% drive roughly a third of footprints and most of the overshoot beyond safe limits. Curbing affluent overconsumption, while securing decent material floors, should be a central policy lever to cut material demand quickly and fairly.

Messages for policy

Prioritize demand-side policies that curb luxury and high-impact consumption among the top income groups.

Adopt progressive resource and consumption taxes and tighten standards for material-intensive goods and services.

Mandate material efficiency, durability, repairability and recycled content in vehicles, buildings and electronics.

Use public procurement and urban investment to shift demand to low-footprint mobility, housing and services.

Guarantee decent material floors (housing, clean energy and food) while capping growth in elite material demand.

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based on P. Tian et al. Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01726-2 (2026).

The policy problem

Global material demand has pushed multiple Earth-system boundaries beyond safe limits. Yet policy still leans on efficiency and national averages, which mask who drives overshoot. Household consumption accounts for a large share of the world’s material footprint, and the burden is starkly uneven: affluent groups exceed sustainable use by wide margins, while the bottom half of consumers remains within proposed material-use thresholds. Treating this as a uniform ‘consumption problem’ risks ineffective and unfair responses. The policy task is to align resource use with planetary limits by addressing demand where it matters most — high-material lifestyles — while expanding access to decent living for those below material sufficiency.

The findings

Using a harmonized global dataset, we find that the top decile of consumers accounts for a disproportionate share of household material footprints. Inequality in abiotic materials (fossil fuels, metals and non-metallic mineral fuels) is high (for example, MF-Gini well above biomass) (Fig. 1), and elasticity analysis shows a ‘re-coupling’ at the top: as expenditure rises, material use — particularly metals — responds almost proportionally. These findings imply that technology-only approaches will underperform unless paired with demand-side measures. Results generalize across world regions, although magnitudes vary. Our estimates exclude capital formation and may understate footprints of the very rich owing to survey under-coverage; therefore, policy design should be robust to underestimation at the top.

Fig. 1: Material footprint inequality in 2017.

a, Lorenz curves of material footprints on the global scale. b, MF-Gini coefficients by eight consumption-goods categories. Filled circles denote the primary sectors of material use for each of the four material types (biomass, fossil fuels, metals and non-metallic minerals).

The study

We link detailed household expenditure data (covering the vast majority of the world’s population across 168 countries) to an environmentally extended multi-regional input–output model that traces materials used through global supply chains. We compute material footprints by income groups and consumption categories and summarize distribution with Gini and Lorenz metrics. We benchmark ‘fair’ use against literature-based sustainable per-capita thresholds, scaled to the household share of total materials, to assess overshoot. This design lets policymakers see where, how and for whom material demand reduction is most feasible and equitable, without relying on technical jargon.

Further reading

International Resource Panel. Global Resources Outlook 2019 (United Nations Environment Programme, 2019); https://go.nature.com/3MChfZkSynthesizes global material flow trends and policy levers for resource efficiency.

Lenzen, M. et al. Implementing the material footprint to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 12. Nat. Sustain. 5, 157–166 (2022). Presents a research platform to report global material footprint accounts and monitor progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8.4 and 12.2.

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Hickel, J., O’Neill, D. W., Fanning, A. L. & Zoomkawala, H. National responsibility for ecological breakdown: a fair-shares assessment of resource use, 1970–2017. Lancet Planet. Health 6, E342–E349 (2022). Provides a fair-shares method to attribute overshoot responsibility across nations.

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Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L. T. & Steinberger, J. K. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nat. Commun. 11, 3107 (2020). Argues that reducing affluent consumption is essential for ecological sustainability.

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Tian, P. et al. Keeping the global consumption within the planetary boundaries. Nature 635, 625–630 (2024). Report of environmental inequality on planetary boundary indicators.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Institute of Blue and Green Development, Shandong University, Weihai, China

Peipei Tian 1.

Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Kuishuang Feng 1.

Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

Laixiang Sun 1.

School of Finance & Management, SOAS University of London, London, UK

Laixiang Sun

Authors

1. Peipei Tian
2. Kuishuang Feng
3. Laixiang Sun

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kuishuang Feng.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Cite this article

Tian, P., Feng, K. & Sun, L. Levers for equitable material use. Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01730-6

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Published: 16 January 2026

Version of record: 16 January 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01730-6