Earth Overshoot Day is a holiday you may not have heard of, but it’s important, grim and getting earlier every year. That’s the day when we reach the point we shouldn’t reach until December 31st – by definition, that means we’re consuming at an unsustainable rate, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.
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Projections from the GFN show Earth’s biocapacity reserve shrinking by the year ever since the 1970s, just as our carbon consumption started to skyrocket.
This Thursday marked Earth Overshoot Day, or the day through which our yearly consumption of Earth’s pure assets surpasses its yearly functionality of regeneration.
We may have just managed to use up Earth’s resources for the entire year. The date has steadily crept forward as more of the world’s resources have been used by a booming human population, they said.
Wackernagel’s organization, the Global Footprint Network, declared August. 13 as the day this year when humanity overshot the planet’s surplus of natural resources and began dipping into the principal supply. Researchers say we can expect within 15 years to consume twice the allowed limit of resources, if the current trends persist.
Now, the agency calls for greener solutions to address the natural resources exhaustion before it go down to risky levels.
“The costs of our ecological overspending are becoming more evident by the day”, said the group, in a release previous year.
This means that for the rest of 2015, we will be “living on resources borrowed from future generations,” the World Wildlife Fund said.
The carbon footprint is inextricably linked to the other components of the Ecological Footprint – cropland, grazing land, forests and productive land built over with buildings and roads. As we continue to outspend our ecological budget, that will lead to serious consequences for our planet. Efforts to halt climate change have primarily focused on stemming carbon emissions, as will a landmark United Nations conference on the topic late this year. If humanity can keep global warming within two degrees celsius of pre-Industrial Revolution levels, then Overshoot Day could be kept in check.
Biological capacity, or biocapacity, is a way to measure an area’s ability to produce biological materials necessary for life, such as food, timber, textiles, and to absorb its waste, most notably carbon dioxide emissions.
That buildup drastically harms the environment through deforestation, drought, fresh-water scarcity, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss, according to GFN.
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‘We can not stress enough the vital importance of reducing the carbon footprint, as nations are slated to commit to in Paris.
