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In 2019, we had already spent our resource budget for the year to July 31, the the first day of overtaking the Earth never recorded by the Global Footprint Network , which has been calculating global and national ecological impacts for nearly three decades. Meanwhile, humanity has exceeded its biocapacity – defined as “the capacity of ecosystems to produce biological materials used by humans and to absorb human-generated waste” – by a few more days each year.
But due to the global coronavirus lockdown, 2020 has turned the tide. This year, Earth Overshoot Day has been moved back more than three weeks to August 22.
Projections indicate a reduction of almost 15% in CO2 emissions (around 60% of the total footprint) in 2020 thanks to the slowdown in the consumption of fossil fuels linked to the pandemic in the transport, energy sectors. , industry, aviation and residential. The Earth’s global overshoot calculation, which uses data like the International Energy Agency, also includes forest production, which fell by almost 9%, and our food footprint, which was stable.
Misery or prosperity on a planet?
According to Mathis Wackernagel, founder and chairman of the Global Footprint Network, this year’s contraction is welcome. But he says the fact that it’s accidental means it’s not durable.
“The tragedy this year is that reducing carbon emissions is not based on better infrastructure such as better power grids or more compact cities,” he told DW. “We have to move the date by design. , not by disaster. ”
To answer to the Objectives of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit warming to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, the current decline in the emission curve should continue at the same pace for the next decade, underlines Wackernagel. At present, however, this is done through economic and social suffering.
“Not doing anything, being stuck at home. It’s not the kind of transformation we need. It’s not sustainable,” Wackernagel said. < / p>
The aim must be to “adjust systematically to the physical budget at our disposal”, added the Swiss of global origin Founder of Footprint Network and winner of the World Sustainability Award 2018. “Do you want the misery of a planet or the prosperity of a planet? ”
Wackernagel argues that the coronavirus itself is a reflection of ecological stress. “These pressures that we see as pandemics, like famine, like climate change, like loss of biodiversity, are all manifestations of an ecological imbalance,” he said.
Reduce emissions for the benefit of all
A key side effect of emission reductions from disasters is that “the pain is going to be unevenly distributed,” according to Wackernagel. Marginalized groups, especially people of color, have been disproportionately affected by the “huge economic impacts of the pandemic,” said Sarah George, senior reporter at Edie, a UK media company that promotes sustainable business practices.
Edie led her first Earth Overshoot webinar in 2019, with the goal of educating organizations to reduce their resource footprint through sustainable business models for all over the long term.
George says this year’s webinar on August 22 will also address the misconception spread by some climate skeptics that a green, low-consumption future is only possible under the privations of a lockdown.
“They used the situation to say that the lockdown is ‘what green activists want’ and that we cannot enjoy things like international travel, economic growth, etc. in a green future,” George told DW.
But post-lockdown George says the goal is to create a one-planet model through which businesses can combine “better economic and social outcomes” with “reduced emissions and air pollution.”
Ecological debt balloons in developing countries
Earth Overshoot Day is calculated both globally and between individual countries, and reveals how developed countries are devouring Earth’s biocapacity at a much faster rate.
In the United States, where the day of the exceedance falls on March 14 of this year, citizens will need around five planets to maintain their outsized ecological footprint. Germany passes 50 days later, May 3, but still needs two planets.
“In Sweden we live as if we have about 4 planets according to WWF and the Global Footprint Network, and roughly the same for the whole of The Nordic region,” climate activist Greta Thunberg wrote last October. by rejecting an award from the Nordic Council for the Environment on the grounds that those in power should instead “listen to the best current and available science”.
While Scandinavia is known for leading investments in renewables and rapid electrification of transport in the case of Norway, data from the Global Footprint Network shows that individual consumption remains highly unsustainable. In contrast, the socialist outpost, Cuba, which overtakes December 1, is one of the few nations to live almost within its means. 2019-2020 fires . The driest continent in the world exhausted its ecological capacity on March 30 of this year.
Australia ravaged by fires has, according to a report by the Global Footprint Network, shown “just how fragile biocapacity can be.”
“With climate change and the overuse of resources, we are placing greater demands on ecosystems that are essential for the survival of not only mankind, but also wildlife,” the authors wrote. “The growing demand satisfied by a less robust biocapacity becomes a dangerous combination. ”
But any attempt to move the date forward towards planetary compatibility will require a systematic reduction of our ecological footprint in a way that also complies with the restrictions. of climate science.
For Mathis Wackernagel, it must start with the individual, a principle which is also fundamental in the fight against the coronavirus. “If you protect yourself, you protect everyone,” he said.
Republished with permission from Deutsche Welle .
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