The disparity in environmental impacts across different countries has been widely acknowledged^1,2. However, ascertaining the specific responsibility within the complex interactions of economies and consumption groups remains a challenging endeavour^3,4,5. Here, using an expenditure database that includes up to 201 consumption groups across 168 countries, we investigate the distribution of 6 environmental footprint indicators and assess the impact of specific consumption expenditures on planetary boundary transgressions. We show that 31–67% and 51–91% of the planetary boundary breaching responsibility could be attributed to the global top 10% and top 20% of consumers, respectively, from both developed and developing countries. By following an effective mitigation pathway, the global top 20% of consumers could adopt the consumption levels and patterns that have the lowest environmental impacts within their quintile, yielding a reduction of 25–53% in environmental pressure. In this scenario, actions focused solely on the food and services sectors would reduce environmental pressure enough to bring land-system change and biosphere integrity back within their respective planetary boundaries. Our study highlights the critical need to focus on high-expenditure consumers for effectively addressing planetary boundary transgressions.

Addressing the total energy cost burden of elderly people is essential for designing equitable and effective energy policies, especially in responding to energy crisis in an aging society. It is due to the double impact of energy price hikes on households—through direct impact on fuel bills and indirect impact on the prices of goods and services consumed. However, while examining the household energy cost burden of the elderly, their indirect energy consumption and associated cost burden remain poorly understood. This study quantifies and compares the direct and indirect energy footprints and associated total energy cost burdens for different age groups across 31 developed countries. It reveals that the elderly have larger per capita energy footprints, resulting from higher levels of both direct and indirect energy consumption compared with the younger age groups. More importantly, the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, have a higher total energy cost burden rate. As the share of elderly in the total population rapidly grows in these countries, the larger per capita energy footprint and associated cost burden rate of elderly people would make these aging countries more vulnerable in times of energy crises. It is therefore crucial to develop policies that aim to reduce energy consumption and costs, improve energy efficiency, and support low-income elderly populations. Such policies are necessary to reduce the vulnerability of these aging countries to the energy crisis.

Achieving European Green Deal (EGD) targets for carbon removal and ecological restoration would reduce agricultural and forestry production within the European Union yet simultaneously extend ecosystem impacts elsewhere. Here we quantify such spillover impacts by coupling an extended multi-regional input–output analysis with an agro-ecological zones model. We find that EGD’s agricultural and forestry targets set for 2030 could result in a 23.9 Mha increase in demand for agricultural land outside the European Union, which in turn would lead to an increase in land-use-related carbon emissions by 758.9 MtCO₂-equivalent (244.8% of EGD’s carbon removal target in the land, land-use-change and forestry sectors) and a biodiversity loss of 3.86 million mean species abundance loss. Such spillover impacts far exceed the ecological benefits from EGD conservation-based import policies, such as promoting deforestation-free products and phasing out food-based biofuel. We then propose three options beyond the primary targets of the EGD with the aim to mitigate such spillover impacts. The assessment of these options reveals the critical role of reducing meat and dairy consumption, highlighting the impact of consumer behaviour on environmental outcomes. This raises questions about public awareness, willingness to change diets and the role of policy in influencing consumer behaviours.

Understanding the impact of climate fiscal policies on vulnerable groups is a prerequisite for equitable climate mitigation. However, there has been a lack of attention to the impacts of such policies on the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, in existing climate policy literature. Here, we quantify and compare the distributional impacts of carbon pricing on different age–income groups in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and then on different age groups in other 28 developed countries. We find that the elderly are more vulnerable to carbon pricing than younger groups in the same income group. In particular, the low-income elderly and elderly in less wealthy countries face greater challenges because carbon pricing lead to both higher rate of increase in living cost among low-income elderly and greater income inequality within the same age group. In addition, the low-income elderly would benefit less than the younger groups within the same income group in the commonly proposed carbon revenues recycling schemes. The high vulnerability of the low-income elderly to carbon pricing calls for targeted social protection along with climate mitigation polices toward an aging world.