Earth Overshoot Day: How BOLD Ideas Helps to Move the Date
Why August 1 st ? One day of the year has started to appear earlier and earlier on the calendar: Earth Overshoot Day. This year falls on August 1 st . Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when humanity’s annual demand on nature exceeds what Earth’ s ecosystems can renew in that year. What does this date mean? This year, we will have exhausted our “resource budget” by August 1. That means that after August 1, we’ll be borrowing from our future selves. At our present rate of resource consumption, we would need 1.7 Earths to sustain us. To translate people’s use of nature into quantified metric, Global Footprint Network adds up all human demands that compete for what the planet renews, or more precisely, it sums up all the biologically productive spaces needed to regenerate this demand. This is what we call humanity’s “Ecological Footprint”. It includes space for food, fiber, timber, waste absorption (particularly CO2 from fossil fuel burning), and space to accommodate our r...