Today marks the day where humanity’s need for ecological resources and services outweighs the amount of resources that Earth can produce in a given year. This is known as Earth Overshoot Day, and it isn’t always on this day.
As this depends on humanity’s increasing demand for resources, the date for Earth Overshoot Day is getting earlier every year…and we need to reverse this. We need to #MoveTheDate and use less of Earth’s resources each year to readdress this issue.
We can do this by focusing on:
- Energy: How we power ourselves
- Food: How we feed ourselves
- Population: How many of us there are
- Cities: How we design and manage cities
- Planet: How we help nature thrive
Although heralded by many, the green recovery is slow in coming and business-as-usual still prevails, fueled by short-term political and financial goals. This trajectory invariably leads to unmanageable economic risk, stranding all assets that are incompatible with climate change and increased resource constraints. Sustained prosperity and wellbeing, however, requires ingenuity to address humanity’s most pressing problem: ecological overshoot.
Fortunately, many solutions already exist today to reverse overshoot and support biological regeneration. 100DaysofPossibility.org will reveal opportunities every day up to COP26. Examples that #MoveTheDate include food waste reduction, refrigerants management, short-chain food systems, smart energy, low-carbon cement, municipal Footprint-driven development strategies, and low-impact ecotourism.
Earth Overshoot Day is calculated by Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation that provides decision-makers with a menu of tools to help the human economy operate within Earth’s ecological limits.
Additional resources:
- Earth Overshoot Day – https://www.overshootday.org/
- 100 Days of Possibility – http://100daysofpossibility.org/
- Global Footprint Network – https://www.footprintnetwork.org/
- COP26 – https://ukcop26.org/