Living beyond our means: Earth Overshoot Day

In less than seven months, humans have used up more natural resources than the planet can re-generate in a year. Our model sheds light on why this is happening.

Skyline Earth Overshoot Day photo

July 29 is the date everyone should mark in their diary in 2019.

That’s because it is Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humans will have used up a year’s worth of the planet’s natural resources, such as timber, fish, water, and minerals.

For the rest of the year, we will be drawing down on what will be available for future generations - using more than the Earth can naturally replenish in a 12-month period - and producing waste such as carbon dioxide emissions as we do so.

What is worrying is that Overshoot Day, calculated by non-profit organisation Global Footprint Network (GFN), has fallen earlier every year since the start of 1970s.

Mega's research paints a similarly alarming picture. It shows that human activity, and the waste it generates, is leading to potentially irreversible changes to the planet’s ecosystem.

Our analysis, which is based on a bio-capacity measurement tool called the Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, quantifies resource consumption and waste emissions across each of the 100-plus industries that make up the global economy. 

Developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the model assesses the state of the ecosystem along nine environmental dimensions – which include water use, land use and ozone depletion among others – to set the ecological “safe operating space” within which human activities should take place.

Already, four of those thresholds have been breached.

Take the biochemical flow of nitrogen and phosphorus for example.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are macronutrients that are used extensively in fertilsers. Intensive farming, industrial activity and population growth have increased the volume of these macronutrients in rivers and oceans to dangerous levels, triggering excessive growth of algae.

This is a problem because algae deplete oxygen in water, killing aquatic plants and fish in a process called eutrophication. Scientists estimate that sea areas with zero oxygen, or “dead zones”, have quadrupled since 1950s, threatening marine ecosystems around the world.1

Our industry level analysis shows biochemical waste is being released at a rate that is 40 per cent more than the environment can handle.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

There are signs that efforts to stop environmental damage – be it policy measures or new innovative technologies to address ecological degradation – are starting to pay off. 

According to GFN, throughout the 1970s to 2014, Overshoot Day fell earlier each year by an average of three days. Since then, however, the pace has slowed to less than a day per year.

Our model also gives reason for optimism. It shows that some of the industries serving forestry, farming and other environmental sectors are managing to reduce the amount of biochemical waste they produce, aided by innovative technologies in areas such as pollution-control.

These companies play an important role in helping us pay our environmental "debt" and live within our means.

GEO eutrophication
[1] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6371/eaam7240

About

Mega

Mega seeks to energise and enrich the debate over how to create a better-functioning economy and society.

Megatrends are the powerful socio-economic, environmental and technological forces that shape our planet. The digitisation of the economy, the rapid expansion of cities and the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources are just some of the structural trends transforming the way countries are governed, companies are run and people live their lives.

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