Humanity needs 1.75 planet Earth to meet its needs

The world lived the “Day of Exceeding Earth’s Resources”, with humanity reaching a level that the planet can produce in a year without depleting its resources, while consumption in the remainder of the year will be at the expense of these resources and will exceed their capacity.

In other words, it takes 1.75 Earths to meet the needs of the world’s population in a sustainable way, according to this index, which was created by researchers in the early 1990s and shows an increasing worsening of the situation.

The two NGOs, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Global Footprint Network stated that July 28 is the date when “humanity consumed everything that ecosystems could renew in one year.”

“In the remaining 156 days (until the end of the year), our consumption of renewable resources will eat away at the planet’s natural capital,” Leticia Mellis of the Global Football Network said at a press conference.

She explained that this does not even take into account the needs of other species that live on the planet, stressing the need to “leave spaces for the wild world as well.”

Earth’s resources are “overrun” when human pressures exceed the ability of natural ecosystems to regenerate.

The Global Footprint Network, which monitors this indicator, indicated that this environmental deficit has continued to widen for 50 years, as it began to be recorded on December 29, 1970, then November 4, 1980, all the way to October 11, 1990, September 23, 2000, and August 7, 2010.

The date of the deadline was delayed by three weeks in 2020 due to quarantine and closure measures aimed at containing the Covid-19 pandemic before returning to previous levels.

6 categories

This date (Earth Overflow Day) is calculated based on the ecological footprint of human activities in six different categories: land and sea areas needed for agriculture and grazing, forest areas needed for forest products, hunting areas, built-up areas, and forest areas needed to absorb carbon emitted from the combustion of “fossil fuels.” Closely related to consumption patterns, particularly in rich countries.

For example, if the entire population of the world lived like the French, the date of “Earth Overshoot Day” would have been earlier than the current date, that is, May 5, 2022.

Diet

Both the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Global Footprint Network considered this overreach to be due to the human diet.

“Our diet has lost its way, and the consumption of natural resources is excessive, not taking into account the requirements to combat poverty,” said Pierre Canet of the World Wide Fund for Nature in France.

The two NGOs stressed that this food system has a “large environmental footprint”, as “food production drives all categories of the footprint, especially agriculture (necessary for animal and human food) and carbon (agriculture is a sector that causes intense emissions of greenhouse gases)”.

“Providing food for humanity requires the use of more than half of the planet’s total biological capacity (55 percent),” they explained.

Pierre Canet specifically noted that “a large part of the food and raw materials are used to feed the animals, which are then consumed by humans.”

The two organizations called, based on scientific recommendations, to reduce meat consumption in rich countries.