• July 24 is Overshoot Day, the date on which humanity exhausts the renewable resources available for the entire year 2025.
• This date reflects a "market failure", explains the Global Footprint Network.
• For Italy, Overshoot Day 2025 already arrived on 6 May.

The Earth makes countless resources available to humanity, such as timber in forests and fish in the seas, as well as services, such as CO2 absorption and the capacity to produce hydroelectric and biomass energy. Yet by 24 July, our species had already exhausted everything the Planet was capable of regenerating over the course of the entire year 2025. This is Overshoot Day, the date on which humanity goes into ecological debt with the Planet. And it has never arrived this early.

Overshoot Day is a "market failure"

As always, Overshoot Day 2025 was calculated by the Global Footprint Network. In simplified terms, it is a ratio between supply and demand. The demand is the ecological footprint — the amount of biologically productive area a population needs to extract resources and absorb emissions and waste; the supply is biocapacity, meaning the productive capacity of a territory's ecological resources. The day on which demand exceeds supply is Overshoot Day. It is clearly a symbol: human activities continue throughout the rest of the year too — there is no switch that turns off. But it is a very powerful symbol, because it shows us just how unsustainable our way of life is.

"From an economic perspective, Overshoot Day represents a clear example of a market failure", reads the statement released by the Global Footprint Network. "Such a failure harms everyone. It poses a direct threat to those who overuse resources — that is, those who depend on large volumes of underpriced natural inputs, which could become increasingly scarce. If left uncorrected, this market mechanism leads to economic disruptions or shocks, as it incentivises self-destructive overuse. Market failure also represents an economic loss for biocapacity providers, who are not adequately compensated."

Overshoot Day 2025 around the world and in Italy

Although it is not possible to directly compare different editions because the calculation method is refined over time, the Global Footprint Network is keen to stress that Overshoot Day 2025 is the earliest ever recorded. In 1971, the year from which this monitoring began, it fell on 29 December — meaning there were just two days of "overshoot". Over the past fifteen years, it has always fallen within the first half of August: in 2020, it shifted slightly later due to the halt in economic activities and travel caused by the pandemic, before quickly returning to previous trends.

If Overshoot Day 2025 falls on 24 July, it means humanity is exploiting nature at a rate 1.8 times higher than the Planet's capacity to regenerate it. But some peoples are more "wasteful" than others. We Italians are among them: in 2025 we reached our Overshoot Day as early as 6 May, and we would need 4.4 Italys to sustain our consumption. If the rest of humanity shared our lifestyle, we would need 2.9 planets. In 2025, the very first country to reach Overshoot Day was Qatar on 6 February, followed by the United States on 13 March, France on 19 April, and Germany on 3 May.