Today, Monday, May 20, is Earth Overcapacity Day in Spain, known as ‘Overshoot Day’ worldwide. This day is a warning cry to the entire society: it means that our country would have already consumed all the natural resources that correspond to it for this year.
Coinciding with this day, the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth highlights the need to transform the current production and consumption model and demands that the Government adopt measures to reduce the use of natural resources.
Earth Overcapacity Day emerged with one objective in mind: to calculate the ecological footprint of each country and the planet with the help of the Global Footprint Network. Likewise, it marks the date on which the natural resources that would correspond to them in a year are consumed. In our country it happens on May 20.
In this way, today Spanish society will have used all the natural resources, water, energy, raw materials, food, among others, that would correspond to it for the entire year. Starting today, we enter an “ecological deficit” since more has been consumed than the Earth is capable of regenerating in that time.
The NGO Friends of the Earth has called for the urgency of reversing the current model of production and consumption: “It is vitally important to limit the indiscriminate use of materials and energy to adapt to the capacity that our planet has to regenerate. The current system is totally unviable to sustain life on Earth,” says Adriana Espinosa, responsible for natural resources and waste at Friends of the Earth.
As the NGO indicates, the material footprint of the European Union doubles the limits that could be considered safe and sustainable, becoming an unfair and unequal system: while the 1.2 billion poorest people are only responsible for 1% of the global consumption, the richest billion people consume 72%.
