Richest Swiss cause most environmental damage

Richest Swiss cause the most environmental emissions Keystone-SDA

The richest 1% of Swiss people emit eight times as much CO2 as the least wealthy half of the population. The Swiss financial centre also contributes massively to the climate crisis, according to an Oxfam report.

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Switzerland shows on a small scale what is happening globally, wrote the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Solidar Suisse in a communiqué on Wednesday. A few wealthy people cause the majority of emissions, while others bear the consequences.

+ Swiss C02 emissions: small country, big impact

This is shown by the new Oxfam report “Climate Plunder: How a powerful few are locking the world into disaster”, for which Solidar Suisse has the Swiss figures. 82% of people in Switzerland belong to the richest tenth of the world’s population. In this country, one person from the richest 0.1% produces 673 kilograms of CO2 per day. That is 26 times more than someone from the poorer half of the Swiss population.

Big banks

UBS has provided over $211 billion for oil and gas projects since the Paris Climate Agreement. Together with the former Credit Suisse, the two Swiss financial institutions invested at least $8 billion in new coal, oil and gas projects between 2021 and 2022, as the NGO wrote.

By withdrawing from the Net Zero Banking Alliance in March of this year, UBS officially abandoned its goal of harmonising its investments with the 1.5-degree target, it added.

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In response to an enquiry from the Keystone-SDA news agency, the bank announced this evening that it was sticking to its decarbonisation targets. Its goal is to reduce the emissions financed by UBS by 70% by 2030 from the base year 2021. “By the end of 2023, we will have achieved a reduction of 80% compared to 2021,” the response stated.

For a fair climate policy, Solidar Suisse called for the rich and corporations to be taxed on their luxury emissions and excess profits and for the influence of the super-rich to be limited by not granting corporations special rights and setting transparent limits on lobbying.

Switzerland should also expand climate financing and development cooperation in order to specifically reduce poverty and inequality – especially in the Global South.

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Translated from German by DeepL/mga

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