Today is when our luck officially runs out because humanity has stripped earth of its ecological resources for the year.
The oceans are empty and the sun has hidden away. The crops are mangled messes and animals lay unmoving. The moon does not light up the road and the earth is matted in darkness. Lightbulbs are failing, oxygen is scarce, and the stench of carbon dioxide is smelt for miles. Cars are stranded without fuel and homes have disintegrated into dust. Humans remain alive, but the earth is a ghost town.
This is what life would look like without earth’s natural resources, yet this image is still not enough to generate widespread panic worldwide. Humanity is overextending the earth’s arm to the point where we are running out of yearly resources before we have revolved around the sun.
Earth Overshoot Day (EOD) falls on August 1 this year, which means in just seven months, humanity has used all the resources earth can regenerate in this given year. For the earth to satisfy the current rate of human demand and consumption of ecological resources, there would need to be 1,7 earths.
More concerning is if the entire world lived like South Africa, the EOD would have been on June 20, meaning we would need 2,1 earths to survive on earth’s resources this year. Whilst not the worst country, we are definitely nowhere near the best.
The Global Footprint Network, an international research organisation, calculates the EOD by dividing the earth’s biocapacity by humanity’s ecological footprint and multiplying it by the number of days in a year.
Simply put, they determine the rate at which earth can produce resources whilst still absorbing waste, and compares this to how dependent humans are on this service each year.
In numbers, the earth’s biocapacity sits at 1,5 global hectares per person whilst the ecological footprint is at 2,6 global hectares per person, where 1,6 of this is a person’s average carbon footprint.
To digest this further, there is a resource deficit of 73% in the world in 2024. This explains the basis of what causes climate change and global warming — overexploitation. The aim of the Global Footprint Network is to illustrate ways in which the economy can operate within earth’s ecological limits. So, it is not all doom and gloom.
Research says cutting greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels by 50% would move the EOD back three months. This makes sense because fossil fuels are the main contributor to waste production and global warming worldwide. If major emitters such as China, the United States of America, Russia, and India were to all set emission targets lower than their current level, the earth’s biocapacity would increase and ecological resources would feel less strain.
Holistic solutions also lie within five major sectors, namely cities, food production, energy generation, population, and the planet.
So, whilst we may have officially run out of resources for this year, we can work towards living within earth’s boundaries so that a happy medium can be obtained in the future.
FEATURED IMAGE: The earth is beautiful and paints the sky in oranges and reds, but it is dying and we need to act quickly. Photo: Victoria Hill
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