Earth Overshoot Day: every year it arrives always sooner

Every year inexorable the Earth Overshoot Day arrives, the fateful day where we exhaust the resources that the planet is able to renew during the whole year. It’s its arrival to make a splash, because it’s inevitable and every year it waits for us breathing down our necks, to remember how much the ecological overexploitation of the planet is a problem and a risk.

What worries us is its precocity, since decades, centuries maybe, the Earth Overshoot Day arrives every year sooner. This year it was the 29th of July, four days in advance compared with the 2018, and with more than five months missed to the end of the year. In this moment we are using resources that the planet is not able to recover.

“On that day, we exhaused the biological resources our planet can renew this whole year”.

Earth Overshoot Day 2019

It’s been two weeks now, since the 29th of July, that we are officially in debt with our dear planet Earth. The perfect machine that is mother earth produces energies and resources for the whole year to support oll of its inhabitants. But the demand of the human beings for a whole year passes the quantity of resources that the planet is able to produce in this period.

We are talking about wood, soil, forests, farming, fishing, etc. Since now on every time we draw to those resources we will cause a massive damage to the environment and the ecosystems. All of our needs, since here to the end of the year, will be provide with non renewable resources. All of it by causing, therefore, dangerous emissions for the atmosphere.

But the one of the 29th of July of the 2019 was only the global Overshoot Day mondiale, in reality it isn’t the same day every where in the world. In Italy it was, even, the 15th of May.

How to calculate the date

It seems easy saying that the human exhausted all the resources of the planet and since now on we are making a huge damage to our ecosystem, but in reality how do the scientists know that it’s right that one the day where the Earth exhausted all of its renewable resources?

To calculate the Earth Overshoot Day is the Global Footprint Network, a no-profit organisation to support the environmental sustainability.

To calculate the date we have to report the biocapacity, which is the capacity of the planet Earth to produce renewable resources, and the human ecologic footprint, which is the request of resources about that year. Everything, afterwards, needs to be divided for the 365 days of the year.

The ecological footprint is different for every city and for every country and the average between them gives the global Earth Overshoot Day. Since the moment that a country passes that edge it will be in an ecological deficit with its territory. This isn’t calculate only in its complex, but even for every request.

For example, the 9th of July the Europe reached the Overfishing Day and since that moment every fish not imported was a fish more that our seas, lakes, rivers and oceans, were not able to renew anymore.

The Earth Overshoot Day in the years

The one of this year is without any doubt the earlier Earth Overshoot Day ever. By arriving the 29th of July the ecological overshooting this year arrived four days in advance compared with the 2018.

An important step forward if we think that in the last year we slowed down, by falling down of only a day per year. By calculating even climbings with more a days in the 2008 and in the 2012 and four days in the 2009.

The 2010, instead, was the worst year, when the Overshoot Day arrived 11 days before compared with the previous years.

In the last twenty years the Earth Overshoot Day moved of two months and currently we are overshooting the Earth like we have 1,75 planets.

What can we do

If we think that the global situation is serious we should look for our country. To follow an italian lifestyle, infact, we will need 2,72 earths.

To respond to emergencies we should follow the suggests of the movement Move The Date, which collects all the ideas to live more sustainable and to move on the date. According to Move The Date, infact, if we are able to move forward the data of five days per year, we should arrive to use only a Earth until the 2050.

This post is also available in: Italiano