How much stuff do people need to lead a decent life? It’s a hard, and subjective, question. But researchers have now estimated for the first time what it takes, quantitatively speaking, to keep one person out of abject poverty: about 6 tons per year of food, fuel, clothing, and other supplies, researchers report this month in Environmental Science & Technology.

The first-of-its-kind estimate is “a remarkable step forward,” says Stefan Bringezu, an expert in sustainable resource management at the University of Kassel who was not involved with the research. “They shed light on the physical basis of our society and economy in a comprehensive and rather detailed way.” According to Bringezu, the findings contain good news: They suggest that ending poverty can be done without taking an unbearable toll on the planet itself.

The study comes as the United Nations wrestled this week with exactly that daunting challenge. The U.N. is trying to kick-start progress on its Sustainable Development Goals, a set of 17 grand ambitions that include ending poverty worldwide by 2030, while also preventing environmental degradation and fighting climate change. Fossil fuels get a lot of attention in this debate, but raw materials such as cement, metal, timber, and grain are also important because their production and refining contributes about 23% of carbon emissions and more than 90% of biodiversity loss.


To make the new estimates, environmental scientists Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao and Stefan Pauliuk of the University of Freiburg and colleagues turned to a common definition of basic living standards created in 2017. The list includes 15 square meters of living space, 2100 calories of food per day for adults, basic appliances such as a washing machine and a modern stove, a phone and laptop, and the means to travel to work or sell their wares.

The researchers calculated the rough amount of raw materials involved in each of these objects and services. From a societal perspective, they looked at two kinds of needs for materials, because they have different implications. The first is very large and essentially one-time investments, such as buying a house. The other is analogous to the ongoing maintenance costs to prevent it from falling into ruin.

The former challenge is large, because ending poverty requires a lot of basic infrastructure, such as building all the needed houses, schools, and roads that allow farmers and villagers to take their wares to market. And building hospitals, for example, that can treat the urban poor. It also includes manufacturing the construction equipment needed for those jobs. All told, these structures require about 43 tons of materials—technically called an “in-use stock”—for each person in currently living in poverty, or 51.6 billion tons of raw materials worldwide.