Earth Overshoot Day 2020
What is Earth Overshoot Day?
The Ecological Footprint of each person varies from country to country. Even more so varying per person. The Ecological Footprint is averaged from each resident and this helps countries to improve their sustainability and well-being. Though what has it got do do with Earth Overshoot day?
There are two parts in calculating the Ecological Footprint: the demand on nature and the supply of nature:
- Demand includes the consumption of natural resources and the amount of forests able to absorb its waste, particularly carbon emissions.
- Supply represents the productivity from land and sea sources.
When a populations demand on resources is greater than that region’s biocapacity, there is a deficit. The region will meet it’s demand through importing supply or liquidating ecological assets to sustain itself, however on a global level there are no additional supply to import from off world.
So when is the date?
This, as the Global Footprint Network calculates, is our world’s Ecological Footprint, and is expressed in two ways. The first through global hectares (gha) per person and the second is how many Earths are needed to meet our demand.
At Global Footprint Network, they calculate how long it takes humanity to use up the amount of supply 1 Earth can generate in a year. This is represented as a date where we go ‘over the budget’ and called Earth Overshoot Day. This day has been getting earlier from December 29 each year since the 1970’s, mainly due to population growth. However, with the goal being #MoveTheDate we can slow this down.
In 2017, Earth Overshoot Day was the 1st of August. In 2019, it was the 29th of July.
And in 2020, it’s the 22nd of August.
This improvement is related to the coronavirus pandemic from this year. However this still means we have a third of the year to go. Subsequently overdrawing on our ecological assets.
At Anderson Energy Efficiency our Purpose Statement is:
Helping to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings
Through our experience in Building Energy Efficiency Assessments, we assist clients to not only achieve Code Compliance, but a building that is more sustainable and helps reduce demand on our Earth’s supply.
We owe it to future generations to do our best to minimise our Ecological Footprint, so they can have the opportunity to enjoy earths resources like we have today.
If you’d like to know how your personal Ecological Footprint compares, try this quick quiz to estimate how many Earth’s you would use: https://www.footprintcalculator.org/