Humanity has used up nature’s budget for 2015 with 20 weeks still left in the year, according to data from Global Footprint Network. Earth Overshoot Day, the date when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in that year, arrived on 13 August this year, four months earlier than it did in 1987.
The costs of this ecological overspending are more and more evident by the day: deforestation, drought, water scarcity, soil erosion, biodiversity loss and carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere are all on the rise and worsening.
Global Footprint Network found that carbon sequestration makes up more than half of the demand on nature, a trend that began in the early 1970s when the world first went into ecological overshoot. And humanity’s carbon footprint “remains the fastest growing component of the widening gap between the Ecological Footprint and the planet’s biocapacity,” says Mathis Wackernagel, president of Global Footprint.
Earth Overshoot Day – also referred to as Ecological Debt Day – has steadily been arriving earlier since it was first calculated in 1987 when it fell on 19 December. This year it arrived just over 4 months earlier. If the world continues on its current trajectory, Earth Overshoot Day would land at the end of June by 2030.
This disheartening trend underscores the need for the world to agree at the Climate Summit in Paris at the end of this year to completely phase out fossil fuels by 2070, says Wackernagel.
Assuming global carbon emissions are reduced by at least 30 per cent below today’s levels by 2030, Earth Overshoot Day could be moved back on the calendar to 16 September 2030, according to Global Footprint Network – a move that is not impossible given that Denmark has cut its emissions over the last two decades by 33 per cent.
Photo credit: charamelody, flickr/Creative Commons
