This Wednesday, August 2, the symbolic limit of “overshoot day” was crossed for 2023, according to calculations by the NGO Global Footprint Network (GFN). This means that the world has consumed all the resources that the Earth can regenerate over a year. In other words, from now on humanity is living on ecological “credit” until next December 31st.
The “Overshoot Day” indicator was created in the late 1980s in an effort to make humanity aware of how much more they were consuming than the planet had to offer . For example, if we refer to the year 2023, it would take “1.7 Earth” to satisfy the consumption of humanity without jeopardizing the renewal of natural resources. To show the constant increase in annual consumption over the past decades, GFN has established the day of the overshoot if it had occurred in 1970: it would have occurred on December 29.
Although a global average, it can be refined and restricted at the national level. So in 2022, while the global overshoot day was July 28, it was May 5 for France. This means that if the whole world applied the average consumption of the French, it would take 2.9 planets.
Initially, several factors come into play to place the overshoot day on the calendar. It is calculated by dividing the Earth’s biocapacity (the ability of an ecosystem to regenerate over a year) by humanity’s Ecological Footprint over the year; the whole is then divided by the number of days in a year (365). To establish an international average, Global Footprint Network uses United Nations data on more than 200 countries. However, many question this calculation system, which is considered imprecise: the data used only comes from the UN and is sometimes four to five years behind.
This expanded field allows for greater accuracy. For consistency, GFN has recalculated results from previous years to avoid a misinterpretable difference between the results of the old method and the new ones. Thus, the result of the calculation of 2022, which was originally July 28, became August 1 after correction. So, no, humanity did not consume in 2023 “five days less” than in 2022.
