It's Debt day - Earth Overshoot.

Last Saturday was the day we all went into ecological debt – known as Earth Overshoot Day.  You may have heard of your ecological footprint – the calculated size of your impact on the earth’s resources.  There are lots of sites to help individuals, house-holds and even schools and businesses calculate their Carbon Footprints – which an estimation of how much Carbon Dioxide they release into the atmosphere every year.

You can do your own calculation on www.footprintnetwork.org.  I did mine and although it didn’t have NZ specific comparisons – I had to say I lived in Australia – I was still pretty horrified to be told that if everyone shared my current lifestyle we would all still need 2.4 planets.  

The Global Footprint Network has gone for the big impact and for three years now it has worked out when the entire planet uses up all of the renewable resources available to it in a year.  When we pass this threshold we essentially go into ecological debt, ‘borrowing’ from the environment resources we can’t replace. 

The date we pass our limits each year keep creeping closer – one reason is that the calculations are growing more sophisticated and accurate – but other reasons are that we are both using more, and replacing less.

For the months from August 21st until 2011 we are globally using more than our planet can replenish for us, and more than we can use without tapping into non-renewable resources - like making toilet-paper from the Amazon rainforest.

Different countries have different rates of consumption, of course.  If we all consumed like Americans do we would need 5 whole planet Earths to satisfy our demands.  China’s consumption is right on the level – if we all had an average Chinese standard of living we would be able to supply all our needs with just the one Earth we have, which is really a good goal to aim for, since we do only have one Earth after all.

Argentina and South Africa both consume resources at about the global average.  At our current use of resources we need 1.4 Earths to be able to sustain that level.

We clearly don’t have 1.4 Earths – the only solution is to reduce our annual consumption to match what the lovely blue planet we do have can provide in a year.

The website www.treehugger.com has some graphs which help explain how they took into account things like forest land, crop land, fishing grounds, built up land and grazing land as well contributions of the main greenhouse gas - Carbon dioxide.  Just search for ‘Earth Overshoot’.

The big question for us is - how are we doing in Opotiki? Are we consuming under or over our fair share?  If we had annual estimations for the annual resource overshoot for Opotiki then we would know what to aim for.  Do we need to reduce our consumption by 80% or 10%? It’s an important issue, and I think we really should find out the answer.