Earth Is Now ‘In The Red’ - We Used Up This Year’s Resources Yesterday

Human beings have just exhausted the planet’s supply of natural resources - meaning we are ‘in the red’ from now on.

Every year, ‘Overshoot Day’ - the point where we go into ecological ‘debt’, in terms of the amount of carbon we emit, and crops we use up - comes earlier.

This year, it arrived yesterday - six years earlier than it did in 2014, according to an estimate by the Global Footprint Network.

The GFN says that our consumption began to exceed the planet’s capacity by the early 1970s - and as the world’s population expands, it has been getting worse each year.

‘Humanity’s carbon footprint alone more than doubled since the early 1970s, when the world went into ecological overshoot.

‘It remains the fastest growing component of the widening gap between the Ecological Footprint and the planet’s biocapacity,’ said Mathis Wackernagel, president of Global Footprint Network and the co-creator of the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric.

‘The global agreement to phase out fossil fuels that is being discussed around the world ahead of the Climate Summit in Paris would significantly help curb the Ecological Footprint’s consistent growth and eventually shrink the Footprint.’