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Resource consumption exceeds Earth’s capacity to produce earlier than last year
August 24, 2015
Resource consumption exceeds Earth’s capacity to produce earlier than last year
13 August marked this year’s date that human activity consumed more natural resources than the Earth can produce, according to data from Global Footprint Network, an international sustainability think tank with offices in North America, Europe and Asia. Each year the date in which consumption overtakes nature’s ability to produce, named "Earth Overshoot Day", occurs earlier - in the year 2000 Earth Overshoot Day occurred in October.
This year, it took less than eight months to go beyond Earth's biocapacity, with carbon sequestration making up more than half of the demand on nature. “Humanity’s carbon footprint alone more than doubled since the early 1970s, which is 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.
Read more at ICLEI Europe.
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