3.1 Global trends in consumption

Learning objectives

• Distinguish between absolute and relative poverty, and describe how extreme poverty is measured with the international poverty line.

• Describe global and regional progress in reducing extreme poverty since 1990, and explain why it has been uneven.

• Explain the growth of the new global middle class and why it matters for resource consumption.

• Construct and interpret a Lorenz curve, and estimate a Gini coefficient from income shares.

• Define the ecological footprint and biocapacity, and evaluate the footprint as a measure of resource consumption at individual, national and global scales.

• Describe global patterns and trends in the availability and consumption of water, including embedded water.

• Describe global patterns and trends in land and food, including changing diets in middle-income countries.

• Describe the changing global energy mix, including hydrocarbons, nuclear power, renewables and new sources of modern energy.

• Examine how trends in poverty, water, food and energy are interrelated through spatial interactions, using Brazil as a case study.

Introduction

Resources are the materials and services that people take from the environment to meet their needs: water, food, land, energy, minerals and the capacity of the air and oceans to absorb waste. How much of them people use depends above all on how wealthy they are. Over the last thirty-five years more than a billion people have escaped extreme poverty, and billions more have begun to eat more meat, buy appliances and cars and travel, so global resource consumption has risen faster than population.

The topic is about process and place. Development is the process that changes how much people consume and what they consume, while place determines where resources are found and which places can afford them. The patterns also depend on spatial interactions: a family in Shanghai eating pork fed on Brazilian soy uses water and land thousands of kilometres away.

Poverty and its measurement

Poverty means lacking the income or resources needed for an acceptable standard of living. Geographers distinguish two ways of defining it, because a household that is poor in Norway may be wealthy by the standards of Niger.

Relative poverty compares people with others in the same society. A common definition in HICs, used by the European Union and the OECD, is a household income below 50% or 60% of the national median. Relative poverty matters because people who are much poorer than those around them may be unable to take part in normal social life, such as owning a phone, sending children on school trips or heating their home, even if they have enough to eat.

The international poverty line

To compare countries, the World Bank uses an international poverty line expressed in purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars, which adjusts for differences in the cost of living. From June 2025 the line is US$3.00 a day per person at 2021 prices, replacing the earlier US$2.15 (2017 PPP) and US$1.90 (2011 PPP) lines. People living below it are in extreme poverty. Two higher lines, US$4.20 and US$8.30 a day, reflect typical national poverty lines in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries.

The line is based on the national poverty lines of some of the poorest countries in the world, converted into a common currency, so it represents a very low standard of living: what US$3.00 would buy in the USA in 2021.

Global and regional progress

Extreme poverty has fallen dramatically. At the US$3.00 line, 43.4% of the world’s population was extremely poor in 1990, 21.0% in 2010 and 10.1% in 2024. With a world population of about 8.2 billion, that is still about 820 million people. The fall has been very uneven between regions.

The graph shows three different paths. East Asia and the Pacific, led by China, cut extreme poverty from 67.0% in 1990 to 2.0% in 2024 through export-led industrialisation, rural reforms, migration to cities and investment in infrastructure.

South Asia, led by India, followed later and fell from 49.7% to 2.6%, with the steepest falls after 2005. Sub-Saharan Africa started at 61.5% in 1990 and was still at 45.0% in 2024. Because its population has grown rapidly, the number of extremely poor people there has risen, so most of the world’s extreme poor now live in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile or conflict-affected states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Yemen.

Sources: World Bank, Poverty and Inequality Platform, share of population below US$3.00 a day (2021 PPP), via WDI SI.POV.DDAY, accessed 2026.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 interrupted progress for the first time in a generation: the world rate rose from 11.1% in 2018 to 11.4% in 2020 as lockdowns closed workplaces and remittances fell, and it fell back below its 2018 level only in 2022. The Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region has gone backwards since 2015, reflecting conflict in Syria and Yemen and economic crisis in several countries. Progress at the higher lines has been slower: in 2024, 46.2% of the world’s people still lived on less than US$8.30 a day.

The new global middle class

As people escape poverty, many do not become rich but join a new group with some money left after paying for food and shelter. The economist Homi Kharas and colleagues at the Brookings Institution call this the “new global middle class”: people living in households that spend about US$11–110 a day per person (2011 PPP), enough to buy consumer goods, eat a more varied diet, take holidays and save.

The new global middle class has grown very quickly. An OECD study estimated it at about 1.8 billion people in 2009. In September 2018, Kharas and Hamel calculated that the middle class and the rich together had passed 3.8 billion people, just over half of the world’s population, for the first time in history, and that about five people a second were joining the middle class. They projected that the middle class would reach about 5.3 billion by 2030, and that almost nine in ten of the next billion would be in Asia, mainly in China, India and Southeast Asia.

The growth matters for resources because consumption rises steeply as people move out of poverty. A middle-class household typically buys a refrigerator, a washing machine and air conditioning, then a motorbike or car; it eats more meat, dairy products and processed food; and it flies. Each of these raises demand for energy, water, land and materials. The middle class in China, India and Brazil therefore drives much of the growth in global resource consumption, even though its consumption per person is still well below that of most people in HICs.

Inequality, the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient

Falling poverty does not mean that incomes are becoming more equal. Inequality describes how unevenly income or wealth is shared, within countries and between them. It can rise even while everyone becomes better off, if the incomes of the rich grow faster than those of the poor.

The Lorenz curve

A Lorenz curve shows inequality as a graph. The population is ranked from poorest to richest along the x-axis and the share of total income they receive is added up along the y-axis. If everyone had the same income, the poorest 20% would receive 20% of income, the poorest 40% would receive 40%, and so on, giving a straight diagonal: the line of perfect equality. The further the curve bows below the diagonal, the more unequal the distribution.

The Gini coefficient

The Gini coefficient turns the Lorenz curve into a single number. It is the area between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve (A) divided by the whole area under the line of equality (A + B). It runs from 0, where everyone has the same income, to 1 (or 100 on a percentage scale), where one person has all of it.

South Africa has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world, 0.54 in 2022 on the World Bank’s estimate, a legacy of apartheid’s unequal access to land, education and jobs. Brazil’s is 0.50 (2024) and the USA’s 0.42 (2024), while Norway (0.27) and Slovakia (0.24) are among the most equal countries. India’s figure of 0.23 (2023) is low partly because it measures consumption, which is more equal than income.

Inequality within and between countries

Inequality between countries has narrowed since about 1990, because incomes in China, India and other emerging economies have grown faster than in HICs. Inequality within many countries has widened, as the gains from growth have gone disproportionately to the richest.

The economists Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanović illustrated this with the “elephant curve” of global income growth between 1988 and 2008: incomes in the middle of the global distribution, mainly in Asia, grew by 70–80% and those of the richest 1% by about 60%, while the lower-middle classes of HICs, around the 80th percentile of the global distribution, gained very little. The result helps explain both the rise of the global middle class and political discontent among workers in some HICs.

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Measuring resource consumption: the ecological footprint

Consumption of many different resources is hard to compare: litres of water, tonnes of grain, barrels of oil and tonnes of CO₂ have no common unit. The ecological footprint, developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in the 1990s and calculated by the Global Footprint Network, converts them into one: the area of biologically productive land and sea needed to supply what a population consumes and to absorb its waste.

Global hectares, biocapacity and the six land types

The footprint adds together six kinds of demand: cropland (food, feed, fibre, oil crops), grazing land (meat, dairy, wool), forest land (timber, paper, fuelwood), fishing grounds, built-up land (housing, roads, industry) and carbon footprint land, the area of forest that would be needed to absorb the CO₂ from burning fossil fuels that the oceans do not take up. The carbon component is the largest and fastest-growing, about 60% of humanity’s total footprint.

Because a hectare of fertile farmland produces far more than a hectare of desert, the areas are converted into global hectares (gha), each representing a hectare of world-average productivity. The supply side is biocapacity: the productive area actually available to a country or the world, also in global hectares.

Biocapacity changes when farming becomes more productive, when land is degraded or built on, and when the population sharing it grows.

When a country’s footprint is larger than its biocapacity, it has an ecological deficit and must import resources, use up its own stocks (such as fish or groundwater) or release CO₂ into the global atmosphere. When biocapacity is larger, it has an ecological reserve.

The global scale: overshoot and Earth Overshoot Day

At the global scale, humanity’s footprint in the 2025 accounts is about 2.51 gha per person against a biocapacity of 1.48 gha, so humanity uses about 1.7 times what the Earth’s ecosystems can regenerate each year. This overshoot began in the early 1970s and is possible only by running down stocks (forests, fisheries, groundwater, soils) and accumulating CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Earth Overshoot Day turns this into a date: the day of the year by which humanity has used as much as the Earth can regenerate in the whole year. It is calculated as world biocapacity ÷ world footprint × 365.

Past dates are recalculated each year as the data improve, so the 2025 date, first announced as 24 July, now stands at 1 August. In the latest recalculation it fell on 29 November in 1980, 23 October in 1990, 23 September in 2000, 15 August in 2010, 1 August in 2024 and 2025, and 30 July in 2026. The jump to 18 August in 2020 reflected the temporary fall in emissions and consumption during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Sources: Global Footprint Network, “Past Earth Overshoot Days” (National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2026 edition), accessed 2026.

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National and individual footprints

At the national scale, footprints per person are highest in rich, energy-intensive countries: Qatar (11.73 gha), Luxembourg (10.12 gha) and the USA (7.05 gha). They are lowest in LICs such as Haiti (0.62 gha) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (0.65 gha). The difference is mainly the carbon component: a Qatari household uses air conditioning, desalinated water and cars powered by cheap fuel, while most households in Haiti use little electricity. Countries with large areas and small populations, such as Canada and Brazil, have big ecological reserves, while densely populated ones such as Japan, China and the UK run large deficits.

At the individual scale, online footprint calculators ask about diet, home energy, travel and shopping and estimate how many Earths would be needed if everyone lived the same way. They show which choices matter most, which are usually flying, car use, home heating or cooling, and meat and dairy consumption.

Evaluating the ecological footprint

The footprint is best seen as a useful communication tool and first approximation. It shows clearly that rich lifestyles cannot be extended to everyone with current technology, and it allocates the impact of traded goods to the people who consume them. It is less good as a full measure of sustainability, because a country could reduce its footprint by switching from coal to nuclear power while its water use or biodiversity loss grew. For water, geographers use a separate measure, the water footprint.

Water: availability and consumption

The global water stock

The Earth holds about 1.39 billion km³ of water, but very little of it can be used. About 97.5% is salt water, mostly in the oceans. Of the 2.5% that is fresh, about 68.7% is locked in glaciers and ice caps and 30.1% is groundwater, much of it deep or very old. Only about 1.2% of fresh water is at the surface or in the soil and atmosphere, and most of that is in lakes.

What matters for people is the renewable supply: the water replaced each year by precipitation and flowing in rivers and aquifers. It is very unevenly distributed. In 2022 the world had about 5,390 m³ of renewable internal freshwater per person, but Iceland had about 445,000 m³ and Canada 73,000 m³, against 2,000 m³ in China, 1,000 m³ in India, 75 m³ in Saudi Arabia and 21 m³ in Qatar. Countries below about 1,000 m³ per person are usually described as water-scarce, an idea explored further through water scarcity and the Falkenmark indicator.

Sources: FAO AQUASTAT via World Bank, WDI ER.H2O.INTR.PC, accessed 2026. Egypt’s figure is so low because almost all its water arrives from outside its borders in the Nile.

Who uses water

Water withdrawal is the water taken from rivers, lakes and aquifers for human use. In 2022, about 71% of global withdrawals were for agriculture (mainly irrigation), 16% for industry (including cooling power stations) and 13% for domestic and municipal use. The balance varies with development: in India and Pakistan more than 90% goes to farming, while in many European HICs industry and power generation dominate. Global withdrawals have risen roughly sixfold since 1900, faster than population, because irrigation, industry and urban water supply have all expanded.

Embedded water and water footprints

Most of the water a person uses is not drunk or used for washing but is embedded in the food and goods they buy. Embedded water, also called virtual water, is the volume of fresh water used to produce a product, counted along the whole production chain. Animal products have the largest embedded water per kilogram, because animals eat large quantities of crops that must be grown first.

Other examples from the same source are about 140 litres for one cup of coffee, 2,400 litres for a hamburger, 40 litres for a slice of bread and 70 litres for an apple. A water footprint adds up all the direct and embedded water used by a person, product, company or country. About 92% of humanity’s water footprint comes from agricultural production, so diet has a far larger effect on a person’s water footprint than washing, cooking or drinking.

Trade in virtual water

When a country exports food, it exports the water used to grow it. Virtual water trade allows water-poor countries to save their own water by importing water-intensive products. Saudi Arabia, with only about 75 m³ of renewable freshwater per person, imports most of its cereals and animal feed; Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, effectively imports water that it would otherwise have to take from the Nile. Water-rich exporters such as Brazil, the USA, Canada and Australia supply large volumes of embedded water through exports of grain, soy and meat.

The flow map shows that virtual water moves mainly from large farming countries with plenty of rain or irrigation water to densely populated or dry importers. Spatial interactions of this kind link water security in Cairo or Riyadh to harvests in Kansas, the Pampas and Queensland. About 2,320 km³ of virtual water a year was traded internationally in agricultural and industrial products in 1996–2005.

The trade does not always flow from wet to dry places. Some water-stressed regions export water-intensive crops: avocados and other fruit from drought-prone central Chile, or cotton from Central Asia, where irrigation helped to shrink the Aral Sea. In such cases trade moves water out of places that can least afford it, often because farmers do not pay the full cost of the water they use.

Land and food: availability and consumption

Arable land per person

Arable land is land that is ploughed and used to grow crops. The world’s total area of arable land has changed relatively little since the 1960s, but the population has more than doubled, so the area per person has halved: from 0.359 ha in 1961 to 0.173 ha in 2023, a fall of 52%. Each hectare must therefore feed about twice as many people as it did sixty years ago.

Sources: FAO via World Bank, WDI AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC, accessed 2026.

Food production has grown faster than population over the same period in two ways. Expansion converts new land to farming, mainly by clearing tropical forest and savanna in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo basin and elsewhere, with large losses of carbon stores and biodiversity. Intensification raises yields on existing land through irrigation, fertilisers, pesticides, improved seeds and machinery, as in the Green Revolution in Asia from the 1960s. Intensification has supplied most of the increase, but it uses large amounts of water and energy (nitrogen fertiliser is made with natural gas) and can degrade soils and pollute rivers.

The nutrition transition in middle-income countries

As incomes rise, diets change in a predictable sequence called the nutrition transition. People eat fewer basic staples such as rice, cassava and millet and more meat, dairy products, vegetable oils, sugar and processed food. The change has been fastest in middle-income countries where the new global middle class is growing.

• China: meat supply per person rose from 24.0 kg in 1990 to 73.5 kg in 2023, an increase of 206%. Pork dominates, and China imports most of the soy used to feed its pigs.

• Vietnam: meat supply rose from 16.2 kg to 60.5 kg per person between 1990 and 2023.

• India: meat consumption remains very low (about 8 kg per person in 2023) because of religious and cultural traditions, but dairy consumption has grown rapidly, making India the world’s largest milk producer.

• Brazil: meat supply per person more than doubled, from 49.6 kg in 1990 to 104.6 kg in 2023, close to the level of the USA (122.1 kg).

Sources: FAO Food Balances via Our World in Data, “Meat supply per person”, 2025.

The nutrition transition has large consequences for resources. Producing a kilogram of meat requires several kilograms of feed grain, so a shift towards meat increases demand for cropland, water and fertiliser far more than population growth alone would. Livestock already use most of the world’s agricultural land as pasture and feed cropland. The change also brings health problems: rising rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, a pattern explored further through the double burden of malnutrition.

Food loss and waste

A large share of food is never eaten. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated in 2011 that about one-third of food produced for people, about 1.3 billion tonnes a year, was lost or wasted. The UN Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index estimated that about 931 million tonnes, 17% of the food available to consumers, was wasted by households, shops and restaurants in 2019, 61% of it in households. In LICs most losses happen after harvest, through poor storage, pests and lack of refrigeration; in HICs most waste happens in shops and homes. Wasted food also wastes the water, land and energy embedded in it.

Energy: the changing energy mix

The energy mix is the combination of sources a country or the world uses to meet its energy needs. Primary energy is energy in the form it is found in nature (crude oil, coal, natural gas, uranium, wind, sunlight, flowing water) before it is converted into electricity or fuels.

Hydrocarbons and fossil fuels

Fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) formed over millions of years from the remains of plants and marine organisms. Oil and gas are hydrocarbons, compounds of hydrogen and carbon; coal is mostly carbon. They are non-renewable, because they form far more slowly than they are used, and burning them is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal is mined, while oil and gas are pumped from porous reservoir rocks deep underground or beneath the sea bed.

Fossil fuels supplied about 81% of the world’s primary energy in 2025 including traditional biomass, almost exactly the same share as in 1990. Within that total, oil remains the largest source because of its role in transport. Coal grew rapidly in the 2000s as China and India built coal power stations and steelworks, and has been roughly flat since about 2013. Natural gas has grown steadily, replacing coal in electricity generation in the USA and the UK. Most growth in energy demand now comes from Asia, while energy use in many HICs has stopped rising or is falling slowly as efficiency improves and industry shifts abroad.

Nuclear power

Nuclear power generates electricity from the heat released by splitting uranium atoms. It produces almost no CO₂ during operation and provides reliable output, but it is expensive and slow to build, creates radioactive waste that must be stored for thousands of years, and carries a small risk of serious accidents.

Nuclear power’s share of global electricity peaked at about 17.4% in 1996 and fell to about 8.8% in 2025, because few new reactors were built in Europe and North America while total electricity demand grew.

The accident at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan in 2011 led Japan to shut down its reactors for years and Germany to phase out nuclear power, completed in April 2023. Other countries are expanding it: China has the largest building programme, and the United Arab Emirates opened the Arab world’s first commercial nuclear station at Barakah, designed to supply up to 25% of its electricity. At COP28 in 2023, more than 20 countries signed a declaration to triple nuclear capacity between 2020 and 2050.

Renewable energy

Renewable energy comes from sources that are naturally replenished: hydroelectric power, wind, solar, geothermal, tidal and bioenergy. Hydroelectricity has long been the largest renewable source of electricity, but wind and solar are now the fastest-growing sources of electricity, because their costs have fallen steeply.

Sources: Ember and Energy Institute via Our World in Data, “Share of electricity from renewables”, 2026.

The table shows different paths. Norway and Brazil have always relied on hydroelectric power from mountainous or wet landscapes. Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) raised its renewable share from 6% to 59% of electricity in 25 years through guaranteed prices for wind and solar power. China installed more solar capacity than any other country and passed 1,000 gigawatts of solar in May 2025, yet it still burns more coal than the rest of the world combined, because its demand has grown so fast. Egypt’s share fell as gas-fired power grew faster than its hydroelectric output from the Aswan High Dam.

New sources of modern energy

Technology has opened up fossil-fuel resources that were once too expensive to use. Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) pumps water, sand and chemicals at high pressure into shale rock to crack it and release shale gas and tight oil. Combined with horizontal drilling, it turned the USA into the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas by the late 2010s, lowered gas prices and reduced US imports. Fracking has been controversial because of groundwater contamination fears, methane leaks, water use and small earthquakes, and it is banned in several countries, including France.

The main shale regions in the USA include the Marcellus in Pennsylvania, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, and the Bakken in North Dakota.

Other new sources include oil sands in Alberta, Canada, where bitumen is mined or melted underground, at high energy and water cost; deep-water oil, drilled beneath more than a kilometre of water in the Gulf of Mexico and off West Africa; and newer energy carriers such as green hydrogen, made by splitting water with renewable electricity, and large battery storage, which helps to balance variable wind and solar output.

Energy poverty

While some people consume more energy than ever, others have almost none. Energy poverty means lacking access to modern energy: electricity, and clean fuels for cooking. About 657 million people had no electricity in 2024, about 8% of the world’s population, and 579 million of them, 88%, lived in sub-Saharan Africa. The total has fallen from 1.34 billion in 2000, thanks mainly to electrification in South Asia, but in sub-Saharan Africa the number has hardly changed, because new connections have only just kept pace with population growth. Many more households cook on wood, charcoal or dung, whose smoke causes serious respiratory disease.

Sources: World Bank, WDI EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS via Our World in Data, “Number of people with and without electricity access”, 2026.

How the trends interrelate

The trends in poverty, the middle class, water, food and energy are not separate. They are linked through a chain of cause and effect and through spatial interactions between places that produce resources and places that consume them.

• Income to diet: as households join the global middle class they eat more meat and dairy, as in China and Vietnam.

• Diet to land and water: more meat requires more feed crops; soy grown in Brazil and fed to pigs in China carries embedded water and land across the Pacific.

• Water to energy: pumping groundwater for irrigation, desalinating seawater and moving water through canals all use energy, and most thermal power stations need water for cooling.

• Energy to food: fertiliser production, farm machinery, refrigeration and long-distance shipping all use energy, much of it from fossil fuels.

• Feedback to the climate: clearing forest for pasture and burning fossil fuels release greenhouse gases, which change rainfall and temperatures and so affect future water and food supplies.

These interactions mean that pressure on resources is often exported. A country can reduce its own water use or land clearance by importing food, but the pressure moves to the exporting country. The links are explored further through the water–food–energy nexus and resource security.

Case study: Brazil, feeding and fuelling a global middle class

Context

Brazil is an upper-middle-income country of about 212 million people and the largest country in South America. It has a vast resource base: about 27,000 m³ of renewable freshwater per person in 2022, five times the world average, the largest share of the Amazon rainforest, the Cerrado savanna, and large offshore oil fields. It is also a place where all the trends in global consumption meet. Its own population has escaped poverty and changed its diet, and it supplies food, water embedded in crops and energy to the growing middle classes of other countries, especially China.

Poverty, inequality and a growing middle class

Brazil’s extreme poverty rate at US$3.00 a day fell from 30.3% in 1990 to 13.7% in 2005 and 4.8% in 2014, helped by economic growth, rises in the minimum wage and conditional cash transfers such as Bolsa Família. Recession after 2014 raised it again; emergency cash payments during the COVID-19 pandemic briefly cut it to 2.8% in 2020, but it rose to 7.5% in 2021 when they were reduced, before falling to 3.0% in 2024.

Millions of Brazilians moved into the global middle class and began buying cars, appliances and more meat. Inequality remains very high: Brazil’s Gini coefficient was 0.50 in 2024, and its richest fifth received 55.4% of income.

Sources: World Bank, WDI SI.POV.DDAY, SI.POV.GINI, ER.H2O.INTR.PC; FAO via Our World in Data; Ember via Our World in Data; National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2025 edition.

Land and food: soy, beef and the nutrition transition

Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, beef, poultry, coffee and cane sugar, and it overtook the USA as the largest soybean producer in 2020. Most soy is grown in the Cerrado and the southern states and is exported, much of it to China, where it feeds pigs and poultry for a population whose meat consumption tripled between 1990 and 2023. Brazilians’ own diets also changed: their meat supply per person more than doubled, to about 105 kg in 2023.

The chart shows Brazil both as a consumer and as a supplier in the nutrition transition. Much of the land for this production came from forest and savanna. Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon peaked at 27,772 km² in 2004 and fell to 4,571 km² in 2012, after satellite monitoring, enforcement, protected areas and a voluntary industry moratorium on soy from newly cleared Amazon land. It rose again after 2015 and reached more than 13,000 km² in the year to July 2021, before falling again from 2023. About 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon is used as cattle pasture.

Water embedded in exports

Every tonne of soy and beef that leaves the port of Santos carries embedded water. Because most of Brazil’s soy and pasture are rain-fed, the water is mainly “green” rainwater rather than water pumped from rivers or aquifers, so the export uses an abundant resource and saves water in importing countries such as China. However, clearing forest reduces the moisture the Amazon recycles into the atmosphere, which supplies rain to farms and cities in southern Brazil, so the trade may eventually undermine the water supply on which it depends.

Energy: renewable electricity, growing oil

Brazil’s electricity is among the cleanest of any large country: 86.6% came from renewables in 2025, mostly from hydroelectric dams such as Itaipu on the Paraná River, with fast-growing wind power in the north-east and solar. Brazil is also the world’s second-largest producer of ethanol fuel from sugar cane, used in flex-fuel cars. At the same time it has expanded oil production from deep-water pre-salt fields off Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and much of that oil is exported. Its energy mix therefore shows both trends in global energy at once: rapid growth of renewables and continued expansion of hydrocarbons.

What the case shows

Brazil shows that the global trends in consumption are connected. Rising incomes reduced poverty and changed diets inside Brazil, and the same process abroad, above all in China, created demand that Brazil’s land and water could meet. The costs of meeting that demand fell mainly on the forests, on Indigenous and traditional communities on the agricultural frontier, and on the global climate. Brazil’s large ecological reserve means it can sustain high exports, but only if land use is managed; its record between 2004 and 2012 shows that deforestation can be cut sharply while agricultural output keeps growing.

Sources: World Bank, WDI (accessed 2026); Our World in Data (FAO, Ember), 2025–2026; Wikipedia, “Agriculture in Brazil”, “Deforestation in Brazil” and “Energy in Brazil” (accessed 2026), citing INPE PRODES and Conab; National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, 2025 edition.

• To what extent is deforestation in Brazil caused by consumption in other countries rather than in Brazil itself?

• Why does embedded water exported from Brazil matter less for Brazil’s water supply than the same volume exported from a dry country?

• How far does Brazil’s energy mix show a transition away from fossil fuels?

Exam practice

This topic appears in Paper 2, where it supplies data-rich stimuli: poverty trend graphs, footprint charts, energy-mix graphs and embedded-water tables. Questions ask students to describe the data, suggest reasons for patterns and explain links between trends; Section C essays often ask about the role of the middle class, inequality or energy change in resource consumption.

Structured question (Section A style)

Refer to the column chart of ecological footprint and biocapacity per person for ten countries and the world.

Part (b) asks for reasons that the chart itself does not give, so the answer must draw on knowledge of physical and human geography.

Part (c) tests understanding of one of the trends without a stimulus.

Infographic question (Section B style)

An infographic titled “The world’s energy in 2025” shows: fossil fuels 81% of primary energy (about the same as in 1990); renewables 33.8% of electricity, up from 18.7% in 2000; China’s solar capacity passing 1,000 GW in May 2025; nuclear’s share of electricity down from 17.4% (1996) to 8.8%; oil, coal and gas consumption all at record highs; and 657 million people without electricity, 88% of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

Extended response (Section C style)

Summary

• Absolute poverty is lacking the means to meet basic needs; relative poverty is being far below the average of one’s own society. Extreme poverty is measured with the World Bank’s US$3.00 a day (2021 PPP) line.

• Extreme poverty fell from 43.4% of the world in 1990 to 10.1% in 2024, led by East Asia and South Asia; sub-Saharan Africa still had 45.0% in 2024, and COVID-19 caused a setback in 2020.

• The new global middle class grew from about 1.8 billion people in 2009 and is projected to reach about 5.3 billion by 2030, mostly in Asia, raising demand for food, water and energy.

• The Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient measure inequality: South Africa (0.54) is among the most unequal countries, Norway (0.27) among the most equal.

• The ecological footprint converts consumption into global hectares; humanity uses about 1.7 Earths, and Earth Overshoot Day moved from 29 November in 1980 to 30 July in 2026.

• Only 2.5% of the Earth’s water is fresh and most of that is ice or groundwater; agriculture takes about 71% of withdrawals, and much water is traded as embedded water in food.

• Arable land per person halved between 1961 and 2023, while the nutrition transition raised meat consumption in China, Vietnam and Brazil.

• Fossil fuels still supply about 81% of primary energy; renewables are the fastest-growing source of electricity, nuclear’s share has fallen, and fracking has opened new hydrocarbon supplies.

• About 657 million people lacked electricity in 2024, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

• The trends interrelate through spatial interactions, as Brazil’s exports of soy, beef and oil to growing middle classes abroad show.

Self-check

• To do:

  I can distinguish absolute from relative poverty and explain the international poverty line.

• To do:

  I can describe regional trends in extreme poverty since 1990 with figures, and explain why they differ.

• To do:

  I can explain what the new global middle class is and why its growth matters for resources.

• To do:

  I can construct a Lorenz curve and estimate a Gini coefficient from income shares.

• To do:

  I can define the ecological footprint, biocapacity and Earth Overshoot Day, and evaluate the footprint as a measure.

• To do:

  I can describe global patterns of water availability and use, and explain embedded water with examples.

• To do:

  I can describe trends in arable land and the nutrition transition in middle-income countries.

• To do:

  I can describe changes in the global energy mix, including nuclear power, renewables, fracking and energy poverty.

• To do:

  I can examine how trends in consumption are interrelated, using Brazil as a case study.