Earth Overshoot Day (EOD), previously known as Ecological Debt Day (EDD), is the calculated illustrative calendar date on which humanity’s resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources that year.
It marks the date when humanity has used more from nature than our planet can renew in that entire year.
As humans use more and more of the Earth’s natural resources, this date is arriving sooner each year. This means that as a race, we are currently using up nature’s resources around 1.7 times faster than the planet’s ecosystems can regenerate them.
Since the day started being observed in 1986, this is the earliest point in the year on which it has ever fallen.
Earth Overshoot Day is calculated by Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation that observes humanity’s use of natural materials, as well as the environmental damage they cause.
Mathis Wackernagel, Head of the organisation, said: “Fires are raging in the western United States; on the other side of the world, residents in Cape Town have had to slash water consumption in half since 2015. These are consequences of busting the ecological budget of our one and only planet.
“Our economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet. We are using the Earth’s future resources to operate in the present and digging ourselves deeper into ecological debt.
“It’s time to end this ecological Ponzi scheme and leverage our creativity and ingenuity to create a prosperous future free of fossil fuels and planetary destruction.”
The Ecological Footprint adds up all of people’s competing demands for productive areas, including for food, timber, fibers, carbon sequestration, and accommodation of infrastructure. Currently, carbon emissions make up 60 percent of humanity’s Ecological Footprint.
Deforestation, fresh-water scarcity, soil erosion, biodiversity loss and the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leads to climate change and severe droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.
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“Our current economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet,” said Mathis Wackernagel, CEO and co-founder of Global Footprint Network. “We are borrowing the Earth’s future resources to operate our economies in the present. Like any Ponzi scheme, this works for some time. But as nations, companies, or households dig themselves deeper and deeper into debt, they eventually fall apart.”
“It’s time to end this ecological Ponzi scheme by design, not by disaster. It’s time to #MoveTheDate.” Wackernagel added. “This is critical if humanity is to thrive.
How to reverse this trend then? If we moved back Earth Overshoot Day by 5 days every year, we would return to using the resources of less than one planet by 2050.
Some examples –
• Replacing 50% of meat consumption with a vegetarian diet would move the date of Overshoot Day by 5 days.
• Reducing the carbon component of the global Ecological Footprint by 50% would move the date of Overshoot Day by 93 days.
For the movement to be successful and for people to know the grave situation we have landed ourselves in, higher momentum is required.
Mobilizing bigger numbers (institutions, businesses and governments), multiply conversations with family and friends, organize neighbourhood gatherings, launch workplace programs and create awareness at school levels – can be some ways in which we can make this thought process a reality. Till the time action isn’t taken, this problem will only become bigger than we can ever envisage.