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Earth Overshoot Day 2009
Thu 24 Sep 2009
On Friday September 25th, humanity will officially have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can produce this year. In other words, more than three months before year end we will have consumed as much as the planet can sustainably provide in a year. To put it another way, to support our current level of global consumption we would need the earth to be about one-third larger.
Since the mid 1980s, humanity has been demanding ecological services faster than the planet can regenerate them, a condition known as ecological overshoot. “Our demand for natural resources is, quite simply, outstripping supply.” Says BFF’s Technical Director Craig Simmons. “The evidence is all around us; the concentration of pollutants in our atmosphere is increasing, forests are shrinking, fish stocks are being depleted, potable water is becoming scarcer and top soil is being eroded.” As a big consumer of natural resources, the UK economy went into overshoot much earlier in the year; May 22nd. Less that six months into the year, more resources were consumed than the UK could sustainably provide throughout a whole year.
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