Australian billionaires have made the list of the world’s richest people with the worst carbon emissions amid calls for governments to “tackle this urgently” as the COP27 summit gets underway.
Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar and mining magnate Andrew Forrest were included in the list of 125 billionaires when Oxfam looked at their investments.
Also on the list were Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet.
Oxfam’s report found that, put together, the world’s super-rich are emitting the equivalent carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) each year as the entire country of France.
Carbon Billionaires: The investment emissions of the world’s richest people analysed the investments of some of the world’s biggest corporates and the carbon emissions of these investments.
The report found these billionaires’ investments equated to an annual average of three million tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than those living in the bottom 90 per cent.
The actual figure is likely to be higher still, Oxfam said.
The billionaire lifestyle of flying private jets and having expensive yachts are also thousands of times the average person’s emissions.
Oxfam Great Britain chief executive Danny Sriskandarajah called on COP27 to “expose and change” the role of big corporates in “profiting from the pollution” driving the global climate crisis.
“And it is people in low income countries who’ve done the least to cause it who are suffering the most — as we are seeing with the devastating drought in East Africa and the catastrophic floods in Pakistan,” he said.
“We need governments to tackle this urgently by publishing emission figures for the richest people, regulating investors and corporates to slash carbon emissions and taxing wealth and polluting investments. They can’t be allowed to hide or greenwash.
“The role of the super-rich in super-charging climate change is rarely discussed … They have escaped accountability for too long.”
It comes as delegates from more than 190 countries kicked off the UN climate summit in Egypt with a deal to discuss compensating poor countries.
For more than a decade, wealthy countries have rejected official discussions on what is referred to as loss and damage, or funds they provide to help poor countries cope with the consequences of global warming.
Meanwhile, Torres Strait Islanders have built a seawall outside federal parliament in Canberra, in a call for stronger climate change action to protect their homes.
“By building a seawall outside Parliament House, we urge the Albanese government to protect our island homes, as the international community exhorts them to take stronger action on climate change at COP27,” Warraber man Kabay Tamu said.
The rally was led by members of the Torres Strait Eight, a group of Indigenous people who won a landmark case at the UN.
In September, the UN Human Rights Committee found the Australian government had violated its human rights obligations to Torres Strait Islanders by failing to act on climate change.
-with AAP
