some highlights from the paper

In 2015, the North’s net appropriation from the South included:

• 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents
• 822 million hectares of embodied land
• 21 Exajoules of embodied energy
• 188 million person-years of embodied labour

“Embodied” here means inputs embodied in the production of traded goods, including manufactured products. IMF’s “advanced economies” list are used as a proxy for the global North. To put these figures in perspective:

• 12 billion tons of raw material equivalents is 43% of the North’s annual material consumption. In other words, nearly half of the North’s material consumption is net appropriated from the South.
• 822 million hectares of land (more than twice the size of India), would in theory be enough to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, depending on land productivity and diet.
• 21 Exajoules of energy would be enough to cover the annual energy requirements of building infrastructure to ensure that all 6.5 billion people in the global South have access to decent housing, public transport, healthcare, education, sanitation, communication, etc.

In other words, all of this productive capacity could be used to provide for local human needs, but instead it is roped into servicing capital accumulation in the North. Patterns of net appropriation reproduce deprivation in the South.

These results also confirm that much of the ecological impact of resource use in the global North is effectively offshored to the global South. The North benefits from appropriated resources while the South suffers the damage.

If these resources are represented in Northern prices, the drain amounts to $10.8 trillion in the final year of data (2015). That would be enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over.