In Italy it is Overshoot Day: if everyone in the world consumed like us, it would take three lands

Less than a month ago Earth Day was celebrated all over the world: between holidays and celebrations, all peoples recalled the importance of safeguarding our planet. Yet, if we look at how each country impacts on the resources that the globe provides us, we are by no means all the same, with gigantic distinctions with respect to our lifestyles and consumption.

For this reason, to remind us how fast we are consuming the resources at our disposal, there is Overshoot Day: in fact it is the day that indicates the overexploitation of the Earth, the one in which we go further and humanity consumes all the resources produced by the Planet throughout the year. If not by making a sort of average (in 2022 it was July 28), however, it is not easy to observe it from a global point of view because each country consumes differently: in Italy, for example, it falls before mid-year, on May 15 (same date also in 2022).

In the middle of this month, in our country we have already used up all the resources available: for the date on which it falls, it is as if to guarantee our lifestyles we had almost three lands (2.7) available for our convenience. But as we know this is not the case.

Between climate crisis, industrial development, agriculture And intensive farming, deforestation, overfish And pollution over time we have increasingly brought the planet to its knees, which now suffers from the impacts of a single species: ours. Since 1970 the world population has increased by 121% and since then nearly 70% of vertebrates have steadily declined or sometimes disappeared. 60% of our footprint, as humanity, is related to carbon and emissions.

In this dramatic general scenario, however, it is possible, with a series of complex calculations (which you can see here), to simulate the ecological debt of individual countries with respect to the Earth: in essence, how a nation is getting into debt with the future with respect to the resources it has available.

In fact, we run out of them with a different speed: if for many African countries this operation is almost non-existent or difficult to calculate, there have been such as the Qatar that as early as February 10 they de facto exhausted the natural resources necessary to satisfy their consumption. Shortly after, on March 13, it’s up to United States, Canada and United Arab Emirates. Our neighbors french on May 5, the Spanish on the 12th andItaly exactly on May 15th. All countries that already before mid-year run out of resources, while on the contrary the most virtuous are the Jamaica (on December 20) and also Ecuador (December 6) and Indonesia (December 3).

On the Overshootday website where all the rankings are reported, to give an idea, the example of Switzerland is given, whose resource overexploitation day is very close to ours (it falls on May 13th). According to experts, if the country had implemented the policies of the Paris climate accordscould have arrived on July 24th.

Despite innovations and commitments in an attempt to stem the emissionsa speech that could also apply to us, “by continuing to consume more than 4 times more than Swiss ecosystems can renew, Switzerland remains vulnerable to the growing risks posed by limited resources” they write on the portal. If the whole world behaved like Switzerland in terms of consumption, the researchers add, “on May 13 humanity would have exhausted what the ecosystems of our planet are capable of renewing in an entire year”. Basically, as for Italy, the regeneration capacity of almost 3 Terre would be needed to meet demand.

However, all this exploitation and the Overshoot Day dates could change if the climate crisis really began to be treated as an emergency and work was done to squander the available natural resources less.

“The future has never been so predictable” the experts recall but “a rapid energy transition could reward us with less extreme climatic events and a more secure and solid supply of resources. On the contrary, too slow an abandonment of fossil energy would increase the risk of untraceable resources and assets, and consequent global tensions and political turmoil”. Waiting to know if we will have improved the date of next year’s Overshoot day, it is therefore already time to run, but in the right direction.