Carbon emission reduction efforts should focus on wealthy individuals, wherever they live, rather than on nations, proposes new research from Princeton University.

“Most of the world’s emissions come disproportionately from the wealthy citizens of the world, irrespective of their nationality,” said one of the paper’s authors, noting that many emissions come from lifestyles that involve airplane flights, car use and the heating and cooling of large homes. “We estimate that in 2008, half of the world’s emissions came from just 700 million people.”

As a result, it proposes to use individual emissions as the way of calculating a nation’s responsibility to curb its output of carbon dioxide. “Our proposal moves beyond per capita considerations to identify the world’s high-emitting individuals, who are present in all countries,” the team says in a paper proposing the new approach.

The methodology does not mean that individuals would be singled out, only that these calculations would form the basis of an emission reduction formula that is more equitable.

The research team, led by Princeton University scientists, hopes that its new approach will win the support of both developed and developing nations, whose leaders have long disagreed over how the responsibility for reducing emissions should be allocated. World leaders are expected to meet in Copenhagen in December for a conference to negotiate a treaty on global emission reductions to address climate change to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

The new research also purports to show that it is possible to reduce poverty and cut carbon emission at the same time. The authors calculate that addressing extreme poverty by allowing almost three billion people to satisfy their basic energy needs with fossil fuels does not interfere with the goal of fossil fuel emissions reduction. The cap would need to be somewhat lower, and high emitters would need to reduce their energy consumption by a slightly larger percentage to make up the difference, they said.