EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY

Source: Daily Mail Reporter

We’ve used up all the resources the Earth can provide for the year and are now in ‘overdraft’, campaigners warn

Humans have used up the natural resources the Earth can provide for the year and are now in ‘overdraft’, campaigners have warned.

The world has reached ‘earth overshoot day’, the point in the year that humans have exhausted supplies such land, trees and fish and outstripped the planet’s annual capacity to absorb waste products including carbon dioxide.

For the rest of the year, the world is in ecological debt, with fish stocks and forests being depleted, land degraded and carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere, the Global Footprint Network said.

Earth overshoot day is calculated by comparing the demands made by humans on global resources - our ‘ecological footprint’ - with the planet’s ability to replenish resources and absorb waste.

This year, in less than nine months, we have used as much of nature as the Earth can regenerate in a year. Earth overshoot day has fallen a couple of days earlier than it did last year.

The Global Footprint Network said that in 1961, humanity only used around two-thirds of the available natural resources on Earth, but by the 1970’s increased carbon emissions and consumption began to outstrip what the planet could provide.

Humans now need the equivalent of 1.5 planets to sustain us, and by mid-century it will have risen to two planets, the campaigners said.

Four-fifths of the world’s population live in countries that use more than their own natural systems can provide.

Not all countries use more than the resources within their own borders can provide but even their ‘credit’ or reserves is shrinking, the campaigners warned.

The world can no longer sustain the widening budget gap between what nature is able to provide and how much our infrastructure, economies and lifestyles require, they said.

Alessandro Galli, Global Footprint Network regional director, said: ‘Everyday life in many Mediterranean countries is showing us what it means to live beyond financial limits.

‘Ecological and financial deficits are two sides of the same coin. Over the long run, nations cannot deal with one deficit without addressing the other.’

The world can no longer sustain the widening budget gap between what nature is able to provide - such as with commercial fishing - and how much our infrastructure, economies and lifestyles require, campaigners have warned.

Andrew Simms, climate economist at Global Witness, who came up with the concept of earth overshoot day at UK think tank the New Economics Foundation, said: ‘The Government consistently tells us that we must buckle down and live within our financial means, but seems intent on pushing us to break our environmental budget.

‘The maths is simple - the UK consumes and produces waste at a rate three and a half times greater than we can sustain, and today humanity has already exhausted what the planet’s ecosystems can provide in a year.

‘We’re in the red and gambling with ecological bankruptcy, as the fracking debate shows. If it chose to, the Government can always print more money, but it can’t print more planet. Ecological overshoot should lead the political agenda.’