Earth Overshoot Day: We’ve used up our ‘budget’ of resources for the year

A quick online search tells you that August 8 was Bowling Day and International Cat Day, but Monday also marked a far more somber occasion: Earth Overshoot Day, or the day where the planet’s population used up all of its allotted resources for the entire calendar year.

According to Quartz and the Huffington Post, the Global Footprint Network has monitored Earth Overshoot Day annually since 1971. It represents the point in which humanity exhausts the natural resources needed to live sustainably for a 365-day period. Each day beyond that point puts us in “ecological debt,” the group said.

As the National Geographic Society pointed out, this year the occasion arrived earlier than ever before, beating the previous record – set just last year – by five days and continuing the trend of mankind blowing through its allotment of natural resources at an ever-increasing rate.

“When overshoot day arrives, it means we have spent all the interest on the planet’s ecological bank account and are now dipping into the capital,” Stuart Pimm, a professor of conservation ecology at Duke University, explained to the Society. “That is, we’re depleting what our planet does for us, so year after year, there is less for us to use. Less forest, fewer fish in the ocean, less productive land – burdens that fall disproportionately on the world’s poor.”

What exactly is Earth Overshoot Day, and how is it calculated?

Officials at the California-based Global Footprint Network use a basic formula to determine when we use up our allotted resources for any given year. They take the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of resources that are available), then divide it by mankind’s ecological footprint (how many of those resources we consume).

That number is then multiplied by the number of days in a year, and the date is determined. The organization said that the global population currently uses 1.6 Earths worth of crops, forest land, livestock, and other resources annually, and by the 2030s, they anticipate that we will be using up more than two Earth’s worth of resources every year, according to the Huffington Post.

“Globally, the longer we go on pretending that natural resources are unlimited, the faster we are jeopardizing the very capacity of our planet to provide us with the renewable resources that we need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves,” GFN spokesman Sebastian Winkler told the website.

“Balancing how much renewable natural resources we use with how much is generated is paramount if mankind is to thrive on our beautiful planet,” Winkler added. “Each of us has the opportunity to participate: the choices we make every day as consumers and as citizens actively contribute to the world that we will leave future generations.”

In addition to breaking down the average global rate of consumption, the GFN also pointed out some of the worst offending nations. According to their statistics, if every country lived like the US, they would use up 4.8 Earths worth of resources each year, while living like Australia would require 5.4 Earths worth of resources. Conversely, the citizens of India were calculated to use the least, consuming just 0.7 Earths worth of resources.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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