Today is the day in 2025 that humanity has consumed all of the annual supply of natural resources – farmland capacity, fish stocks, forests, and emit more CO2 etc – that ecosystems can regenerate or absorb. This is called “Overshoot Day” and the day this falls each year is getting earlier and earlier as we pillage our planet.

To explain this in more mundane terms, we can describe this in terms of an investment. Imagine we have a million pounds capital invested and through various means, like interest, this produces a monetary return for us. If we live sustainably off of only the returns, the one million pounds remains and generates new money for us to live off next year. If we overspend, and instead of just spending the returns, we start digging into the one million pounds, we have less money invested for the following year – let’s say nine hundred thousand pounds. Less money makes less returns, so we have less to sustainably live off, and we’re more likely to dig further into capital making the situation worse still, year on year. In effect, we are spending the money we’d pass to our children to enable them to live in the future.

The one million pounds represents our ecosystems, the returns represents what those ecosystems can sustainable produce for us to use.

From today onwards for the year of 2025, we are digging into our ecosystems in an unsustainable way, spending what should be protected to enable our children to live in the future.

For more information on ecological overshoot see https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/

This is why living sustainably is so important, why what Sustainable Uttlesford is trying to promote is so important.