• 6 May 2025 is Italy's Overshoot Day: a date that arrives earlier than in previous years.
• This indicator, calculated by the Global Footprint Network, shows that we are consuming the Planet's resources too quickly.

Once again, our lifestyle has led us to consume too quickly the renewable resources that the Earth was able to offer us for the entire year. Today, 6 May, is Italy's Overshoot Day: this means we will be in debt to our Planet for the rest of 2025. A date that arrives well ahead of previous years: in 2024 it fell on 19 May, in 2023 and 2022 on 15 May. At a global level, in recent years it has fallen in the first half of August.

How Overshoot Day is calculated

The Overshoot Day is the result of a calculation that the Global Footprint Network carries out both on a global scale and for individual countries. By processing and weighting data from multiple sources, researchers are able to compare supply and demand. On the demand side is the ecological footprint, that is, the amount of biologically productive land and sea area a population needs to obtain resources (plant-based food, livestock and fish, fibres, timber and other forest products, space for infrastructure) and to absorb the waste it generates (in particular CO2 emissions). On the supply side is biocapacity, that is, the productivity of a territory's ecological resources. In other words, it is the speed at which the Planet is able to absorb the waste produced by humanity and generate new resources.

Both indicators are expressed through the same unit of measurement, global hectares (gha). At this point, researchers divide biocapacity by the ecological footprint and multiply the result by 365 (or 366 in a leap year). The result is the Overshoot Day, that is, the day of the year on which the planet's resources are no longer sufficient to meet people's demand. Clearly, it is a symbol: even after 6 May, we Italians will still have access to the food, space, and products we need to carry on with our everyday lives. However, we will do so by placing our Planet (the only one we have) under greater pressure than it is inherently capable of sustaining.

Overshoot Day in Italy and other countries around the world

In 2024, the global Overshoot Day fell on 1 August. It is still too early to know the 2025 date, as the Global Footprint Network has chosen to announce it officially on an occasion with strong symbolic value: 5 June, World Environment Day. We do know, however, that since 2011 it has always fallen within the first ten days of August. With one notable exception: 2020, the year in which the pandemic forced governments around the world to impose strict lockdown measures, halting international travel and a large part of productive activities. As a result, the Overshoot Day also shifted to mid-August.

Preliminary data on individual countries' Overshoot Days are already available, however. Once again, the first to exhaust the renewable resources the Planet has to offer is Qatar, which goes into debt as early as 6 February, followed by Luxembourg (17 February) and Singapore (26 February). The United States stretches its natural resources through to 13 March. Italy's Overshoot Day, falling on 6 May, is fairly close to that of other Western European countries, such as France (19 April), Germany (3 May), the Netherlands (5 May), and Spain (23 May). The last Overshoot Day belongs to Uruguay, on 17 December.