High-income countries are the prime instigators of excess consumption – an individual in North America consumes 90kg of resources each day, across the whole supply chain of the goods and services they use, compared to 10kg consumption by an individual in Africa.
Resource extractivism is often ignored in conversations about the climate crisis, particularly in Western narratives. Broadly defined, extractivism is an unsustainable and exploitative extraction of resources from an area by a private or public company. Extractivism is inextricably linked to excess resource use and a product of a capitalist system of production and consumption. For the past several decades, global consumption of resources has become exponentially high. Today, we extract and consume 60 billion tons of raw materials per year, 50% more than we did 30 years ago. High-income countries are the prime instigators of excess consumption – an individual in North America consumes 90kg of resources each day, across the whole supply chain of the goods and services they use, compared to 10kg consumption by an individual in Africa.