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Earth Overshoot Day reported as August 1st

 

Earth Overshoot Day is the day when humans’ demand for natural resources exceeds what the planet can renew that year.  It’s a metric that has been created and tracked by the Global Footprint Network, a non-profit that generates data points from scientific research and surveys.

This year, the day when the Earth consumed as many resources as would be generated in the entire year was earlier this month, the earliest it’s ever been.

1970: Dec 29
1975: Nov 30
1980: Nov 3
1985: Nov 4
1990: Oct 11
1995: Oct 5
2000: Sept 23
2005: Aug 26
2010: Aug 8
2015: Aug 6
2018: Aug 1

If you think that this is just a concern of scientific academics, which might be enough, banks are now making investment decisions based in part on the risks associated with this data.

From the HSBC note:

Extreme events this year have included wildfires and heatwaves. Although seasonal in many countries, large-scale wildfires have appeared in latitudes as far north as Scandinavia and temperature records were broken in some areas.

The general consensus is that climate change is making such events more likely to occur and more severe.

These events have economic implications – asset loss and behavioural changes – as well as human and social implications such as lives lost and livelihoods disrupted. In our view, adaptation to climate change will move further up the agenda with a growing focus on the social consequences as scientists work on attribution analysis for specific events.

The Global Footprint Network lists the Unites States as the nation with the fourth highest over-consumption behind Qatar, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates.

 

 


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