According to Phys, an international study led by Jason Hickel, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), analyzed the data and determined the amount of sustainable resources each country used so far.

The study was done to tell how much each country went over their threshold.

Human activity heavily impacts Earth's planetary processes, sometimes exceeding some of those, CO2 emissions, climate change, land-use change and biodiversity loss being some of them.

They are the result of heavy resource extraction, which has grown significantly over the past half a century andp exceeds safe and sustainable levels nowadays.

In fact, the global economy uses about 90 billion tons of materials every year, which is way more than what industrial ecologists consider to be acceptable.

In fact, between 1970 and 2017, so almost 50 years, a total of about 2.5 trillion tons of materials have been extracted globally, with high and upper-middle economies using most of the resources. Of all the extracted materials, 1.1 trillion are considered by experts to have gone beyond the sustainable limits.

But researcher Jason Hickel says that "not all nations are equally responsible for this trend; some nations use substantially more resources per capita than others through material extraction, production, consumption and waste."

He was able to determine that, over the selected period, high-income countries, which account for 16% of the world population, were responsible for 74% of the global excess resource use.

The United States is the main country that went beyond the sustainable limits, with 27% of the total resource use, followed by high-income countries in the European Union, with 25%.

Among the first 15 countries responsible for over exceeding the sustainable threshold are Japan, Germany, France and Canada.

China is an upper-middle-income country and it ranks second worldwide with regards to resource usage, being responsible for 15% of the excess material use.

By contrast, 58 countries in the Global South, representing the low-income and middle-income countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, are accounting for only 8% of the excess material use.

This means that 3.6 billion people of the total 7.9 billion world population remain within sustainable levels.

National responsibility for material use has changed over the years, with countries like the US grown consistently in absolute terms, but its share of over usage went down over the past two decades, which is similar to what happened to Europe and other high-income nations.

China is the only country that saw an escalation of material use, especially construction materials, and their growth in excess usage started in 2001.

Jason Hickel concluded by saying: "The results show that wealthy nations bear the overwhelming responsibility for global ecological breakdown, and therefore owe an ecological debt to the rest of the world. These nations need to take the lead in making radical reductions in their resource use to avoid further degradation, which will likely require transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches."