Abstract
Recent sustainability science research focuses on tradeoffs between human well-being and stress placed on the environment from fossil fuel consumption, a relationship known as the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB). In this study we assess how the effect of economic development on consumption-based CIWB—a ratio of consumption-based carbon dioxide emissions to average life expectancy—changed from 1990 to 2008 for 69 nations throughout the world. We examine the effect of development on consumption-based CIWB for the overall sample as well as for smaller samples restricted to mostly high-income OECD nations, Non-OECD nations, and more nuanced regional samples of Non-OECD nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We find that the effect of economic development on CIWB increased through time for the overall sample. However, analyses of the Non-OECD and OECD samples indicate that while the effect of development on CIWB increased from null to a moderate level for the Non-OECD nations, the effect of economic development was much larger, relatively stable through time, and more unsustainable for the OECD nations. Additional findings reveal important regional differences for Non-OECD nations. In the early 1990s, increased development led to a reduction in CIWB for Non-OECD nations in Africa, but in more recent years the relationship changed, becoming less sustainable. For the samples of Non-OECD nations in Asia and Latin America, we find that economic development increased consumption-based CIWB, and increasingly so throughout the 19 year period of study.
Highlights
A growing body of research focuses on the environmental impacts of human well-being, and the extent to which socio-economic processes and conditions influence well-being and environmental interrelationships [1,2,3,4,5,6]
carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) is typically operationalized as a ratio between per capita anthropogenic carbon emissions and an established measure of human well-being where higher values mean a larger level of carbon emissions per unit of well-being, while lower values indicate a lower level of emissions per unit of human well-being [7]
The two-way fixed effects help account for omitted variable bias, which would be of greater concern if the fixed effects were excluded since the estimated models do not include non-dichotomous predictors other than gross domestic product (GDP) per capita that are known to impact both carbon emissions and average life expectancy
Summary
A growing body of research focuses on the environmental impacts of human well-being, and the extent to which socio-economic processes and conditions influence well-being and environmental interrelationships [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Within this work, increasing attention is paid to the amount of fossil fuel energy used—and the amount of carbon emissions generated—to maintain a certain level of human well-being. Development and the Consumption-Based Carbon Intensity of Well-Being human well-being is referred to by some scholars as the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) [7], an approach that builds on the broader ecological intensity of well-being framework in structural human ecology [1, 8,9,10]. A central question in this area of research asks: if reducing CIWB is a potential pathway towards greater sustainability, how can nations throughout the world successfully achieve it [7, 11,12,13]?
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