Humanity Will Exhaust This Year’s Budget For Natural Resources by August 22

In 2019, the “Earth Overshoot Day”—or the day by which a researcher think tank calculates earth would have consumed all the resources it can afford consuming in a year—was on July 29. This was the earliest overshoot day in history i.e. humanity consumed biological resources the fastest it ever had, last year.

In the 1970s, earth’s biocapacity was more than enough to meet the annual human demand for resources. Since then, however, the day has been creeping up earlier and earlier in the year. Metaphorically speaking, if Earth were a bank, we'd be in over our heads with overdraft fees way before the years end. But in 2020, in a rare reversal, the day has been delayed by three weeks. Which means, humanity has consumed less for the year and so, will exhaust its resources for this year by Saturday, August 22.

This, while being a welcome change, is not quite good news.

It is a direct result of the coronavirus shutdowns, which reduced humanity’s ecological footprint by 9.3 percent and put a remarkable dent on the global economy.

The Global Footprint Network, an environmental research organisation which calculates global and national ecological impact to calculate the overshoot day, has been working on this for three decades. It collects more than 15,000 data points per country, largely from United Nations sources. The researchers, then, compare the earth's biocapacity (the amount of resources the planet's land and seas can generate in a year) to humanity’s ecological footprint (that year’s demand for things like food and urban space, and forests to absorb our emissions of carbon dioxide). It then determines the gap, using the data to determine the results annually.

The group is committed to pushing the day back every year. The pandemic, however, was not how they had planned this would happen. “The fact that Earth Overshoot Day is later this year is a reflection of a lot of suffering, and the reflection of imposed changes to our lives,” Laurel Hanscom, the Global Footprint Network chief executive told The New York Times. “I don’t think there’s a silver lining to that.”

According to Mathis Wackernagel, founder and president of the Global Footprint Network, the coronavirus is itself a reflection of ecological stress. "These pressures that we see—like pandemics, famine, climate change, biodiversity loss—are all manifestations of an ecological imbalance," he told DW.

Projections point to almost 15 percent reductions in CO2 emissions (around 60 percent of the total footprint) in 2020 as a result of the pandemic-related slowdown in fossil fuel use across the transport, power, industry, aviation and residential sectors. The irony of 2020 is that this reduction, something scientists have been striving for since ages, is not based on better infrastructure or more sustainable living. It is based on economic and social suffering.

A key side-effect of disaster-driven emission reductions is also the fact that the burden is going to be unevenly distributed. That means, marginalised groups, especially people of colour, who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic's huge economic impacts, are mostly facing the brunt.

Moreover, researchers say that the assumption that a green, low-consumption future is only possible under the deprivations of a lockdown is false. Climate sceptics have used the situation to say that the lockdown is what “green campaigners want” and that they cannot enjoy things like international travel and economic growth in a green future. But the organisation’s goal is to create a planet model where businesses can couple “better economic and social outcomes” with lower emissions.

The consumption varies in different countries as well. The U.S., for example, would’ve hit the Overshoot Day early in the year, on March 14. The small socialist outpost Cuba, on the other hand, overshoots on December 1, and is one of the few nations that's almost living within its means.

Australia is a country that has been regarded as a biocapacity giant due to its relatively small population and vast natural resources. This year, however, it is running a biocapacity deficit for the first time in its history after the devastating fires of 2019-2020.  A fire-ravaged Australia has, according to a Global Footprint Network report, shown "how fragile biocapacity can be."

The researchers reiterate that humanity will come into balance with the Earth one way or the other.  And they want it through intentional, designed efforts, not through such a disaster that comes at such a high and terrible human cost.

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