“Material footprint” refers to the total amount of raw materials extracted to meet final consumption demands. It is one indication of the pressures placed on the environment to support economic growth and to satisfy the material needs of people. The global material footprint rose from 43 billion metric tons in 1990 to 54 billion in 2000, and 92 billion in 2017—an increase of 70 per cent since 2000, and 113 per cent since 1990. The rate of natural resource extraction has accelerated since 2000. Without concerted political action, it is projected to grow to 190 billion metric tons by 2060. What’s more, the global material footprint is increasing at a faster rate than both population and economic output. In other words, at the global level, there has been no decoupling of material footprint growth from either population growth or GDP growth. It is imperative that we reverse that trend.

The material footprint per capita has also increased at an alarming rate. In 1990, about 8.1 metric tons of natural resources were used to satisfy an individual’s needs. In 2017, that rose to 12.2 metric tons, an increase of 50 per cent. That year, high-income countries had the highest material footprint per capita (approximately 27 metric tons per person), 60 per cent higher than the upper-middle-income countries (17 metric tons per person) and more than 13 times the level of low-income countries (2 metric tons per person). The material footprint of high-income countries is greater than their domestic material consumption, indicating that consumption in those countries relies on materials from other countries through international supply chains. On a per-capita basis, high-income countries rely on 9.8 metric tons of primary materials extracted elsewhere in the world.

Domestic material consumption (DMC) measures the total amount of materials directly used by an economy to meet the demands for goods and services from within and outside a country. At the global level, DMC is equivalent to the material footprint, and reached 92 billion metric tons in 2017. DMC increased from 2010 to 2017 in all regions of the world. Particularly striking is the increase in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia, where about 10 billion more metric tons were used in 2017 than in 2010. That increase accounts for about two thirds of the increase at the global level.

The rising share of Eastern and South-Eastern Asia and other emerging economies in global DMC is due to two dynamics. The first is the construction of new infrastructure in emerging and transitioning economies, a pattern that many developing countries are likely to follow in the future. The second is the outsourcing of the material- and energy-intensive stages of production from high-income nations to less resource-efficient countries. The shift in production from the former to the latter means that more natural resources are needed to produce the same output.

Because that shift in economic activity happened faster than improvements in resource efficiency in individual countries, material intensity—defined as domestic material consumption per GDP—stagnated at an average of 1.16 kilograms per dollar from 2010 to 2017. In 2017, developed countries used about one fifth as many natural resources as developing countries to produce the same amount of economic output. Between 2010 and 2017, material intensity decreased in many regions, showing some progress towards the relative decoupling of economic output and DMC. But material intensity increased in other regions, resulting in no change at the global level. Good progress has been made in sub-Saharan Africa, Central and Southern Asia and Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), mostly as a result of increases in GDP.