Humanity is on ecological debt, and this is so sad!! According to a new report, in just over seven months, humanity has used up a full year’s allotment of natural resources such as water, food and clean air. What is really significant about that is that “it is the quickest rate ever”.
Pascal Canfin of green group WWF said: “We continue to grow our ecological debt,” adding that “From Monday August 8, we will be living on credit because in eight months we would have consumed the natural capital that our planet can renew in a year.”
The gloomy milestone is marked every year on what is known as Earth Overshoot Day. To calculate the date for Earth Overshoot Day, the group crunches UN data on thousands of economic sectors such as fisheries, forestry, transport and energy production.
The fastest-growing contributor to ecological overshoot, however, are Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions,which make up 60 percent of humanity’s demands on nature—what is called the ecological “footprint”.
Earth #Overshoot Day is early this year! See how the date evolved over time: https://t.co/h6BkW5egWA @EndOvershoot pic.twitter.com/ZUk1cM2rh9
— ChainPoint (@ChainPoint) July 19, 2016
According to the UN, the number of people on Earth is forecast to grow from 7.3 billion today to 11.2 billion by the end of the century—piling further pressure on our planet and its finite resources.
“The rate at which Earth Overshoot Day has moved up on the calendar has slowed to less than one day a year on average over the past five years, compared to an average of three days a year since the overshoot began in the 1970s,” said the network. This is good news
Stay updated with our article, for steps on how to stop all this from happening.
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