Humanity Set to Bust Our Yearly Ecological Budget on Aug. 1
Earth Overshoot Day—a marker of when the world’s 7.6 billion people will “use more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year”—will fall on Aug. 1, the earliest date yet since we first went into ecological debt in the 1970s.
“In other words, humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate—or ‘using 1.7 Earths,'” said the Global Footprint Network in a press release.
The international research organization uses Ecological Footprint accounting to calculate the date each year. Last year’s Earth Overshoot Day fell a day earlier on Aug. 2.
“As we mark Earth Overshoot Day, today may seem no different from yesterday—you still have the same food in your refrigerator,” Global Footprint Network CEO Mathis Wackernagel said in the press release. “But fires are raging in the Western United States and in Cape Town, South Africa, residents have had to slash water consumption in half since 2015. These are consequences of busting the ecological budget of our one and only planet.”
So what will happen after Aug. 1? In the remaining five months of 2018, human beings will…
