The world's highest-consuming 10 per cent of people could be causing an environmental damage worth USD 1.7 trillion to USD 5.7 trillion a year -- 60 per cent of which live in the US and the European Union (EU), while only about two per cent are in India, a new study has estimated. About 40-45 per cent of EU's and over half of the US' population falls within the highest-consuming group, findings published in the journal Communications Sustainability show. Researchers from the universities of Oxford in the UK and Leiden in the Netherlands combined consumption-based environmental footprints with prices from the Environmental Prices Handbook 2024 to estimate the monetary cost of damage across climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and freshwater use.