LSN : News : Stat: What high-net-worth individuals cost the planet

How have Bleisure lifestyles radically changed the travel industry?

Bleisure, the pandemic-boosted lifestyle shift combining business and leisure travel, has grown in popularity due to businesses maintaining flexible working policies. The Bleisure tourism industry accounts for almost 33% of the global business travel market, with innovations spanning hotels, co-working spaces and more (source: Future Market Insights). This great merging has unlocked new ways of splitting work and leisure, from which emerges a new lifestyle typology that The Future Laboratory has dubbed the Promad: purposeful, progressive and proactive nomad.

Watch Chris Sanderson, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, offer a brief overview of the trend, and learn more about how the Bleisure category will undergo further radical changes as consumers use the opportunity to extend their stays.

Find out more

LS:N Global members can find our Bleisure Redefined foresight research here. LSN:Global is the trends and consumer foresight platform that powers The Future Laboratory’s services, which include our highly regarded Strategy team who can help unpack the relevance of Bleisure Redefined specifically for your business. So get in touch with us now to find out how we can help you make a better, more resilient future happen.

Foresight Friday – highlights from Luxury Week

Photography by The Future Laboratory, UK

Every Friday, we offer an end-of-week wrap-up of the topics, issues, ideas and virals we’re all talking about. This week, foresight editor Fiona Harkin captures a few of the highlights and insights from The Future Laboratory and LS:N Global’s Luxury Week (4–8 September).

While it’s back-to-school for some, la rentrée for others, we’ve plunged right into September by immersing our clients in the business of luxury. Here are a few highlights and links you might have missed.

: Are the HENRYs on your radar? Otherwise known as the ‘working rich’, these high-earning-not-rich-yet consumers are a typology set to grow in prominence as Millennials and Gen Z affluents prepare to inherit unprecedented amounts of wealth. Our co-founder Martin Raymond presented his white paper on this Great Wealth Transfer at the fourth Modern Affluence Summit on Tuesday 5September. If you want to know more, do get in touch.

: ‘We make everything feel like a collectible. That means the pieces don’t have a story in common, except craftsmanship – that’s the common thread,’ says Farah Marafie, creative director and founder of AOI. Marafie joined our webinar panel at the launch of LS:N Global’s new Luxury Recrafted macrotrend this week and we also profile her fascinating anti-consumption luxury model here.

: Acquisition, Discernment, Emotion, Responsibility, Intellect, Elevation – these are the new Luxury States forming the backbone of our latest foresight framework. This proprietary framework addresses evolving perceptions of luxury and we unpack each individual State in our upcoming New Codes of Luxury 2025 report – but from this week, you can book our highly renowned strategists to deliver a high-impact sprint service specific to you and your team, so get in touch to book now.

Quote of the Week

‘It isn’t about using money as an instrument for profit – that was my parents’ generation – it is about using it as a force of change, impact and unprecedented difference.’

– Anonymous UHNWI about to benefit from an influx of wealth from her parents’ family, speaking to The Future Laboratory

Stat: What high-net-worth individuals cost the planet

Photography by Cottonbro Studio, Russia

US – Having financial resources doesn’t equate to greater climate responsibility. Researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a study of income-based contributions to the total greenhouse gas emissions in the US that reveals the disproportionate footprint of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs).

The research found that not only can 40% of emissions be traced back to the income flows of the top 10% in the US, but the top 1% of earners alone generate 15–17% of the nation's emissions. Jared Starr, a sustainability scientist at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the new study, suggests that rather than taxing consumables, income- and shareholder-based taxation could effectively drive change. ‘In this way we could incentivise the Americans who are driving and profiting the most from climate change to decarbonise their industries and investments,’ he says. ‘It’s divestment through self-interest, rather than altruism.’

These findings show why HNWIs are adopting low-key and inconspicuous behaviours, what we call Uneasy Affluence, amid rising ‘eat the rich’ ideologies and social tensions that stem from ever-growing disparities in wealth and privilege.

Strategic opportunity

Businesses servicing the wealthiest 1% should strive to make sustainability sexy. How can you maintain excellence and quality while reducing waste and promoting regeneration?