The world has been living on credit since yesterday

Every year, Earth Overshoot Day reminds humanity of the challenges of conservation and how to live in an environmentally friendly way.

“To regenerate what humanity consumes, we would need 1.75 Earths in terms of surface area.” The tone is set. The world has been living on credit since August 1, 2024, as is stated every year. Humanity has thus “consumed all the resources that the Earth can produce in one year.” What is special is that the day of the overshoot is ahead of what happened in 2023. “This which illustrates our excessive consumption of the planet’s natural resources“. For the remaining five months, humanity is expected to nibble away at the natural capital needed to sustain life on Earth by the year 2025. In an effort to raise awareness among humanity about the challenges of sustainable resource exploitation, the impacts of intensive agriculture are being highlighted by various stakeholders. It should be noted that the Overshoot Day is calculated by the NGO Global Footprint Network.

Decline

Despite showing increasing trends in environmental degradation and biodiversity, the Big Island is still one of the countries with biological reserves. According to data from the NGO Global Footprint Network, biocapacity exceeds the ecological footprint by 146%. It should be noted that there is an ecological deficit when the ecological footprint of a population exceeds the biocapacity of the area available to that population. A national ecological deficit means that the country imports net biocapacity through trade, liquidates national ecological assets, or emits more carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere than its own ecosystems absorb.

José Belalahy