Earth Overshoot Day 2023

Wednesday, August 2, will be this year’s Earth Overshoot Day. That is the day when humanity’s demand for natural resources and services exceeds what Earth can regenerate in the whole of this year. It is a measure of the use of resources for all human activities, and of the waste products that we expect the Earth to sort out for us – the greatest of which is carbon dioxide. It measures the damage we do each year to the natural world on which we totally depend, and shows that we would need the resources of 1.7 planets for humanity’s consumption to be sustainable.

Use of Earth’s resources is not of course fairly distributed: two-thirds of all countries do not have an Overshoot Day, because they live within their share of the resources. Conversely, countries like Canada and the US have their Overshoot Day in early March: were all humans to consume at that rate, we should need 5 Earths to provide the resources. The UK’s Overshoot Day was 10 weeks ago, at which rate of consumption we should need 2.6 Earths. Before 1970 there was no World Overshoot Day, not because there was no measurement, but because the human race was still living within its means. The lesson to think and pray about is that, in a rich country, we all need to use much less of everything, and we all need to waste much less of everything – most importantly, of food.