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Ageing society in developed countries challenges carbon mitigation

Nature Climate Change volume 12, pages 241–248 (2022)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 12 April 2022

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Abstract

Populations in developed countries are ageing. However, the impact of senior citizens’ consumption on global carbon mitigation is poorly understood. Here we find that senior citizens have played a leading role in driving up GHG emissions in the past decade and are on the way to becoming the largest contributor. Considering the greenhouse gas footprint of household consumption across age groups in 32 developed countries, the senior contribution to national total consumption-based emissions increased from 25.2% to 32.7% between 2005 and 2015. Seniors in the United States and Australia have the highest per capita footprint, twice the Western average. The trend is mainly due to changes in expenditure patterns of seniors. The increasing carbon footprint of senior citizens will probably drive domestic production yet have limited effects on international carbon leakage. The demographic change poses more challenges in local mitigation and calls for deeper public mitigation efforts.

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Fig. 1: Rising contribution of the aged group to GHG footprint of the Global North.
Fig. 2: The aged group driving household-related GHG emissions.
Fig. 3: Rising expenditures for the aged group.
Fig. 4: Ageing society requires strict local mitigation.

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Data availability

The EXIOBASE 3.7 data are available at: https://zenodo.org/record/3583071#.YPA5e0kzabg. Household expenditure by ageing groups is sourced from: EU Household Budget Survey (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/household-budget-surveys/database), US Consumer Expenditure Survey (https://www.bls.gov/cex/csxstnd.htm), Japan Family Income and Expenditure Survey (https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/sousetai/1.html) and Household Expenditure Survey, Australia (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/finance/household-expenditure-survey-australia-summary-results). The asset and liability data are sourced from Household Finance and Consumption Survey (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/hfcs/html/index.en.html) for listed European countries, Office of National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/adhocs/008570totalhouseholdwealthanditscomponentsbyagebandgreatbritainjuly2006tojune2016) for the United Kingdom, the Federal Reserve (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/) for the United States, Family Income and Expenditure Survey (https://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/sousetai/1.html) for Japan and Household Budget Survey (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/finance/household-expenditure-survey-australia-summary-results) for Australia.

Code availability

Code to calculate the carbon footprint and associated decomposition analysis is available at: https://github.com/HeranZheng/Aging-society-and-carbon-mitigation.

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Acknowledgements

The research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41921005, 72140001, 72173133, 71974141,72033005), the SHAPE project (Norwegian Research Council 300330), the Bymarka project (Norwegian Research Council 287690/F20), the Royal Society (IEC\NSFC\191520) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NE/V002414/1, 2021 GRIP02COP-AQ).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Industrial Ecology Programme, Department of Energy and Process Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Heran Zheng, Richard Wood, Daniel Moran & Edgar Hertwich

  2. Graduate School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Yin Long

  3. College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

    Zengkai Zhang

  4. The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London, London, UK

    Jing Meng & Dabo Guan

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

    Kuishuang Feng

  6. Department of Earth System Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Dabo Guan

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Contributions

H.Z., R.W. and K.F. designed the research. H.Z. led the study and drafted the manuscript with efforts from all other authors (Y.L., R.W., K.F., D.M., Z.Z., J.M., E.H. and D.G.). H.Z., Y.L. and Z.Z. collected the raw expenditure data. R.W. constructed the EXIOBASE model. H.Z. and Y.L. conducted the decomposition analysis.

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Correspondence to Richard Wood, Zengkai Zhang or Kuishuang Feng.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 The carbon footprint by age groups in absolute unit.

The carbon footprint by age groups for 5 grand categories of 32 developed countries, from 2005 to 2015.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Per capita expenditure in Hotel & Restaurant and Real Estate Service.

Per capita expenditure in Hotel & Restaurant and Real Estate Service for different age groups for 5 grand categories in 2015.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–6, Discussion and Tables 1–7.

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Zheng, H., Long, Y., Wood, R. et al. Ageing society in developed countries challenges carbon mitigation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 241–248 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01302-y

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