Does the headline look familiar to you? It’s because we wrote almost the same one last year. Except in 2018 we mentioned that we had used a year’s worth of Earth’s resources for August 1. This year we have achieved this worrying milestone on July 29, a few days earlier.
We live beyond our means. We have already consumed the amount of resources that our planet can renew in one year. And we seem to be unfazed.
Every year we reduce this green budget and at our current rate of resource use we would need 1.75 planets to support our demand on Earth’s ecosystem.
The calculations include resources such as the amount of water, land, fish and forests that we use, as well as the amount of CO2 that we are pumping into the atmosphere, basically a measure of our ecological footprint.
Our carbon footprint specifically is now 60% of our total global ecological footprint, with an overspending of 33 days of our exhausted budget caused solely by CO2 emissions.
Before the 1970s, our use of resources was within the limits of what our planet could produce: in 1961, we only used three-quarters of our annual resources. But since then, our use of resources has gotten out of control. It goes downhill and without brakes.
“ We only have one Earth: this is the definitive context for human existence. We cannot use 1.75 lands without destructive consequences,” said Mathis Wackernagel, founder of the NGO Global Footprint Network – Global Ecological Footprint Network – in a statement. press.
And lately, these consequences are becoming clearer and clearer, with the sixth mass extinction underway and the effects of climate change escalating. Overwhelming heat waves, massive habitat destruction, the loss of an entire glacier …
Of course, not all countries are the same when it comes to resource use. In this GFN graph you can see the use of resources by countries (the US would require five planets, for example and Spain, which would need 2.5 planets, already exhausted all its natural resources on May 28 ):
This day of the Earth’s overcapacity varies every year and is calculated after comparing the annual demand for natural resources with the capacity that the Earth actually has to regenerate them. Since 1970 the date has been advanced by three months in the last 20 years.
While we are taking some small steps to reduce our impact on nature, such as the UK’s decision to impose 6 days without burning CO2, there is still a long way to go.
If we managed to delay this Ecological Debt Day five days a year, we could be living within our planet’s resource limits by 2050. Humanity eats the planet with a voracious appetite. The loss of biodiversity is alarming too. We must do something to remedy it.
Referencia: Earth’s Resources For The Year / Global Footprint Network /
