The European Union reached, with a tremendous margin, the date that marks the consumption of all the natural resources the Earth is capable of regenerating in a year.
If every human being on the planet had a lifestyle comparable to that of the average European citizen, the planet would have exhausted all its natural resources on 10 May and we would need roughly 2.8 worlds to satisfy our insatiable appetite. It is clear that, since only one planet Earth exists, this kind of consumption is absolutely unsustainable, and we are degrading natural environments — and the ecosystem services they provide — at a faster rate than they are able to regenerate. The alarm was raised by WWF and the Global Footprint Network, which have calculated that 10 May, just five months into the year, is Europe's Overshoot Day for 2019.
To survive, our species cannot do without certain services provided by mother nature, such as food, fibres, timber and the ability of forests to absorb CO2. We behave as though these resources were infinite, even though we know full well that they are not. While the tendency to overexploit such resources appears to have accompanied Homo sapiens since its earliest days, it has been exponentially exacerbated by the advent of consumerism and growth at all costs. According to the report published by the two organisations, the European Union, despite being home to only 7 per cent of the world's population, consumes almost 20 per cent of the Earth's biocapacity. The first nation to exhaust its available resources was Europe's wealthiest: Luxembourg.
"The EU and its citizens are currently using natural resources at a rate twice as fast as European ecosystems can renew them," the report states. The per capita ecological footprint — that is, the amount of natural resources consumed by each citizen of the Old Continent — is the highest on the planet, alongside that of the United States. For the remaining seven months of 2019, we will therefore have to plunder the Earth's natural capital, generating more emissions than ecosystems are able to absorb, felling more trees than can grow back, and catching more fish than can be born.
Overshoot Day is the date that marks the official exhaustion of the renewable resources the Earth is capable of regenerating over the course of 365 days. Humanity began consuming more than the Earth could produce in the early 1970s; since then, the day on which the limit is exceeded has been arriving ever earlier (in 1975 it fell on 28 November), due to global population growth and the expansion of consumption worldwide.
Last year the global Overshoot Day arrived earlier than ever, on 1 August, while Italy used up all its resources almost three months earlier, on 24 May. This year the situation has deteriorated further and, according to calculations by the Global Footprint Network — which assessed the ecological footprint of Italians by calculating annual demand and comparing it with that of the entire world population — the fateful date will be 15 May.
Pushing back Overshoot Day by managing resources wisely is an absolute necessity to guarantee lasting prosperity for citizens across Europe and the world. "Europe's Overshoot Day is a stark reminder that EU consumption is contributing to the ecological and climate breakdown of the planet," said Ester Asin, director of WWF's European Policy Office. The means and knowledge to reduce environmental devastation exist and are well understood — they simply need to be put to use. On the occasion of the informal European Council Summit, held in Sibiu, Romania, where the future of Europe was under discussion, WWF called on EU political representatives and leaders to take specific actions to reduce Europe's ecological footprint: