The overshoot day is the day when the human demand for Earth’s ecological recourses and services exceed it’s capacity to regenerate. It simply means that if the overshoot day happens before the year is over, we are living on recourses we don’t really have. We are basically undermining Earth’s capacity to provide ecosystem services in the future.
The overshoot day is calculate by Global Footprint Network. They calculate a global average but also on a country base. If everyone consumed and lived like that country, the overshoot day can happen before or after the global average. Both supply and demand on biocapacity is measured within each country.
The overshoot day is an initiative by Andrew Simms from the UK and New Economics Foundation, which partnered with Global Footprint Network in 2006 and since 2007 WWF have been a part of the campaign. The overshoot day has however been calculated all the way back to the 70s. Sadly the day has fallen sooner and sooner on the year, from October and, as now, in August. This means that we are using more and more resources in a non-sustainable manner.
In 2020 the overshoot day was the 22h of August.
In 2019 it was the 27th of July.
If you look at the graf of the yearly overshoot days you can see that it’s not a straight increasing line, rather it sometimes seems to decrease, or go down. This is because during an economic stagnation, recession or setback, consumption and production decreases. Earth simply get an opportonity to breath. In 2020, Covid-19 came and put countries and partly economies into lockdown. Activities decreased and less ecological rescues were needed.
However, economic stagnation or putting a hold of the economy is not a sustainable solution. A crisis, like the Corona-virus, can never be a solution of a system fault. There’s several research indicating that a short crisis normally leads to higher activities afterwards. And even if we didn’t stimulated the economy the social and economic impact wouldn’t be beneficial for the investments that needs to be done to remove our societies away from fossil fuels and a consumption based society.
That the date happen later this year, is nothing to celebrate, but it do tells us something. It says that we simply need to cut on the activities. We need to produce and consume less, which also means that we can’t have exponential growth. This is the system fault that needs to be corrected and focused at. Everything else would only mean addressing the symptom of the sickness, not the cause of it.
Learn more on overshootday.org