World approaches Overshoot Day

The 27^th September is Earth Overshoot day, the day of the year where we have used up all the resources that the Earth can regenerate within a year. The Global Footprint Network (GFN) is publicizing the day, ‘in which we have demanded a level of services from nature equivalent to what the planet can provide for all of 2012’. It has now been several decades since the Earth was not in resource deficit.

The principle was devised by the New Economics Foundation and is a novel yet important way of symbolizing the way in which we are depleting the planets resources. For as long as humanity has lived on the planet, it has been able to cope with the levels of fishing, forestry, water use and contamination, loss of biodiversity and waste. Now, in the last few decades, this is no longer the case. The exact day of the year is not possible to calculate, but the GFN says that the day is moving forward by about 3 days a year and the world has been in deficit for at least 10 years and up to perhaps 1970, depending on which data set is used.

There are 3 key factors to consider: the population, the amount of natural resources and how much we are consuming. Population is one of the key drivers of the problem, with exponential growth and no sign of it leveling off until at least 2050; it is very difficult to deal with the issue of population quickly. It is an inter-generational problem which requires some huge long term changes in areas such as education and the emancipation of women in the developing world to overcome.

The problem of overshooting the world’s means is therefore a long term problem, which will not change in the short to medium term future; what must be advocated is a long term plan to deal with population issues, such as achieving the Millennium Development goals as well as continuing carbon reduction strategies and following principles such as reduce, reuse, recycle.