عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Oxfam Expects World to Have First Trillionaire within 10 Years

An armed policeman stands on the rooftop of a hotel near the Congress Centre during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. AFP-JIJI
An armed policeman stands on the rooftop of a hotel near the Congress Centre during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. AFP-JIJI
TT
TT

Oxfam Expects World to Have First Trillionaire within 10 Years

An armed policeman stands on the rooftop of a hotel near the Congress Centre during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. AFP-JIJI
An armed policeman stands on the rooftop of a hotel near the Congress Centre during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Monday. AFP-JIJI

The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organization Oxfam International said Monday in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed to the gathering of political and business elites at the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, reckons the gap has been “supercharged” since the coronavirus pandemic.

The group said the fortunes of the five richest men — Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett — have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic.

Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a “decade of division,” noting that “We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth.”

“On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer,” he added in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum’s annual meeting takes place this week.

“Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade,” Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. “Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years.”

John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil fame is widely considered to have become the world’s first billionaire in 1916.

Currently, Musk is the richest man on the planet, with a personal fortune of just under $250 billion, according to Oxfam, which used figures from Forbes.

By contrast, the organization said nearly 5 billion people have been made poorer since the pandemic, with many of the world’s developing nations unable to provide the financial support that richer nations could during lockdowns.

In addition, Oxfam said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which sent energy and food costs soaring, disproportionately hit the poorest nations.

With Brazil hosting this year’s Group of 20 summit of leading industrial and developing nations, it was a “good time for Oxfam to raise awareness” about inequalities, said Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of inequality policy. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has put issues that concern the developing world at the heart of the G20 agenda.

Oxfam said measures that should be considered in an “inequality-busting” agenda include the permanent taxation of the wealthiest in every country, more effective taxation of big corporations and a renewed drive against tax avoidance.

To calculate the top five richest billionaires, Oxfam used figures from Forbes as of November 2023. Their total wealth then was $869 billion, up from $340 billion in March 2020, a nominal increase of 155%.

For the bottom 60% of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

Canada’s 2023 Wildfires Burned Huge Chunks of Forest, Spewing Far More Heat-Trapping Gas Than Planes 

The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
TT
TT

Canada’s 2023 Wildfires Burned Huge Chunks of Forest, Spewing Far More Heat-Trapping Gas Than Planes 

The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)
The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, British Columbia, Aug. 18, 2023. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP, File)

Catastrophic Canadian warming-fueled wildfires last year pumped more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than India did by burning fossil fuels, setting ablaze an area of forest larger than West Virginia, new research found.

Scientists at the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland calculated how devastating the impacts of the months-long fires in Canada in 2023 that sullied the air around large parts of the globe. They figured it put 3.28 billion tons (2.98 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, according to a study update published in Thursday's Global Change Biology. The update is not peer-reviewed, but the original study was.

The fire spewed nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year, study authors said. It's about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647 million cars put in the air in a year, based on US Environmental Protection Agency data.

Forests “remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere and that gets stored in their branches, their trunks, their leaves and kind of in the ground as well. So, when they burn all the carbon that's stored within them gets released back into the atmosphere,” said study lead author James MacCarthy, a research associate with WRI's Global Forest Watch.

When and if trees grow back much of that can be recovered, MacCarthy said, adding “it definitely does have an impact on the global scale in terms of the amount of emissions that were produced in 2023.”

MacCarthy and colleagues calculated that the forest burned totaled 29,951 square miles (77,574 square kilometers), which is six times more than the average from 2001 to 2022. The wildfires in Canada made up 27% of global tree cover loss last year, usually it's closer to 6%, MacCarthy's figures show.

These are far more than regular forest fires, but researchers focused only on tree cover loss, which is a bigger effect, said study co-author Alexandra Tyukavina, a geography professor at the University of Maryland.

“The loss of that much forest is a very big deal, and very worrisome,” said Syracuse University geography and environment professor Jacob Bendix, who wasn't part of the study.

“Although the forest will eventually grow back and sequester carbon in doing so, that is a process that will take decades at a minimum, so that there is a quite substantial lag between addition of atmospheric carbon due to wildfire and the eventual removal of at least some of it by the regrowing forest. So, over the course of those decades, the net impact of the fires is a contribution to climate warming.”

It's more than just adding to heat-trapping gases and losing forests, there were health consequences as well, Tyukavina said.

“Because of these catastrophic fires, air quality in populated areas and cities was affected last year,” she said, mentioning New York City's smog-choked summer. More than 200 communities with about 232,000 residents had to be evacuated, according to another not-yet-published or peer-reviewed study by Canadian forest and fire experts.

One of the authors of the Canadian study, fire expert Mike Flannigan at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, puts the acreage burned at twice what MacCarthy and Tyukavina do.

“The 2023 fire season in Canada was (an) exceptional year in any time period,” Flannigan, who wasn't part of the WRI study, said in an email. “I expect more fire in our future, but years like 2023 will be rare.”

Flannigan, Bendix, Tyukavina and MacCarthy all said climate change played a role in Canada's big burn. A warmer world means more fire season, more lightning-caused fires and especially drier wood and brush to catch fire “associated with increased temperature,” Flannigan wrote.

The average May to October temperature in Canada last year was almost 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than normal, his study found. Some parts of Canada were 14 to 18 degrees (8 to 10 degrees Celsius) hotter than average in May and June, MaCarthy said.

There's short-term variability within trends, so it's hard to blame one specific year and area burned on climate change and geographic factors play a role, still “there is no doubt that climate change is the principal driver of the global increases in wildfire,” Bendix said in an email.

With the world warming from climate change, Tyukavina said, “the catastrophic years are probably going to be happening more often and we are going to see those spikier years more often.”