July 30 is Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. It means that for the rest of the year, we are using resources beyond what our planet provides.

—

Today marks the day when humanity’s resource consumption exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources for the year, a reminder of how unsustainable modern consumption patterns are and how these are adding immense pressure to our planet’s ecosystems.

Since the 1970s, human resource use has outstripped Earth’s capacity, building up a massive “ecological debt.” Wiping that debt clean would require 20.6 years of complete planetary rest and recovery – though much of the damage is likely irreversible.

This year, it falls on July 30, a week later compared to last year; overall, however, the day has been occurring earlier since the 1970s. At the current rate of consumption, which is 73% faster than Earth’s ecosystems can regenerate, experts estimate that it would take 1.73 Earths to produce and regenerate all the resources we use today.

“We are stretching the limits of how much ecological damage we can get away with – it is now a quarter into the 21st century and we owe the planet at least 20 years of ecological regeneration, even if we stop any further damage now,” said Lewis Akenji, board member of Global Footprint Network, the international research organization behind Earth Overshoot Day. “If we still want to call this planet home, this level of overshoot calls for a scale of ambition in adaptation and mitigation that should dwarf any previous historical investments we have made, for the sake of our common future.”

Overshoot days are calculated for individual countries, too. This year, Qatar had the earliest overshoot day (February 4), followed by Luxembourg (February 17), Singapore (February 23) and Kuwait (March 3). The US’s Overshoot Day fell on March 14 and China’s on May 27. Honduras has the latest one on November 27.