Exploring “Overshoot day”

Can we turn back the clock?

1. Overshoot day as a whole

In 2019, World’s overshoot day falls on August 1st, meaning that over the course of a year, we collectively consume the annual output of 1.75 planets Earth.

The red line was first crossed in 1970, when we broke the balance between resources produced and consumed in a year. Since then, the drift has continuously increased, with the notable (and somehow disturbing) exception of all major economic crises: 1975, 1993, 2001, 2008–2009

Notice how economic crises are the only times where we tend to diminish our ecological footprint (Source)

When I think about “Overshoot day”, this is what comes to mind:

This statistic itself is a very powerful summary of where we stand as of 2019, purposely not taking into account any “justification” by country, development state, etc.. This is the cold, hard situation.

2. Overshoot day in details

Of course the global average of 1.75 Earths derives from a variety of situations; looking at it by country gives the more interesting perspectives, with 3 questions in particular:

• Can countries self-sustain their citizens’ ecological footprint? (spoiler alert: general answer is ‘no’)
• In which countries is the demand per capita compatible with a 0-sum game at the global Earth level (hint: ‘even-fewer-countries’ than for previous question)
• In a general manner, how do countries rank in terms of absolute contribution to ecological gap ? And in particular how do small developed countries (like France) compare to large emerging ones (like China or Brazil)?

When is your country’s overshoot day? France is May 14th- source

For a given country, 3 overarching parameters can help answer these questions: sheer size (surface area), population density and per capita ecological footprint.

If we accept the idea that all countries should consume no more than their fair share of World’s resources, the “truest” indicator for overshoot day becomes the consumption per capita of their inhabitants (expressed in “Global hectares”, a synthetic measure of ecological impact), compared to the total resources available and divided by the world population.

Footprint per capita: higher than 1 means ‘living in debt’; higher than 1.75 means ‘worst than average’

This gives a first notion of “how many planets Earth would be needed if inhabitants of country X covered the entire planet:

Thanks to their disproportionate sizes, some countries manage to hold an “okay” balance at country level: for instance Brazil or Russia are biocapacity “creditors” towards the World; in both cases this is not because these countries’ inhabitants are “frugal”, but rather because these countries are disproportionately large compared to their population.

See in particular Russia and Brazil that are largely creditors to world ecological footprint, largely due to their size and relatively low population density

source: http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/

Conversely, high population density can significantly worsen the ecological deficit of a given country.

For example Japan is at the same time a densely populated country, with an above average per capita footprint (same as France actually). The result is that nearly 8 “current Japan(s)” would be needed to fulfill Japan ecological footprint — whereas we would “only” need 2.8 planets Earth to sustain ~7 Billion Japanese citizens.

Conversely, the USA would “only” need 2.2x of their current territory to satisfy their internal demand. However a world covered with American citizens would require up to 5 planets Earth (a statistic championed by Qatar @ 13 Planets Earth)

3. The hitch(es) :

A common argument among climatosceptics is that there’s not much point in making huge efforts “if China, Brazil or India have decided it’s their time to go wild”

The fact is that China is really the only quantitively significant contributor to ecological footprint (among BRICS countries), representing a solid 25% of worldwide impact.

Still Europe as a whole accounts for 17% itself, so there is plenty of rooom for us Europeans to make an impact:

Source: footprintnetwork datapack, 2016

In terms of per capita footprint, it is worth noting that China is already at European /France level in terms of carbon footprint. Other types of impact such as grassland, cropland may still have room to increase.

Lastly, I am personally not convinced that a country like China will take the road of “you had your turn, now it’s our time to fool around” as:

• Their carbon footprint is already at the level of mature countries and,
• There are signs that China is really trying to get “ahead of the curve” in fields like smart city , green energy, AI, etc. ; examples in Shenzhen and Liuzhou, construction of one of World’s first 3rd Generation Nuclear reactors to start replacing the very polluting network of Coal power plants.

I attended a conference this year where Dr. Yuan Ding (Chinese academic that acquired French nationality, teacher at HEC business school), explained than private sector and and investors are more and more playing a leading role in these initiatives, contrary to a common belief. So China may very well choose to “skip over the teenage crisis” and fast forward toward a modern and efficient way of life.

There is still a second — and more problematic — issue with turning back the climate clock:

There is clearly uncertainty around how much individuals will actually get involved in the climate challenge (including willingness to recycle, cut back on air travel, favor local food, etc.). A good way to proceed then is to determine a “best” and “worst” case scenario.

Disappointingly enough, [serious] studies have calculated that, even in most optimistic scenarios, individuals could only cover (up to) 40% of required cutback efforts (in the context of the global 2° temperature reduction objective by 2050)

Source: Carbone 4 : “Faire sa part” study (link)

The missing piece of the equation is actually deeply linked to how our societies work and how our economies are organized. it has to do with how we live, move, work, make business, etc. For example:

• How far do people live from their workplace in general ? What is their transportation mode ? (linked to how cities and global economy are organized)
• How are all the public services organized and distributed : schools, hospitals, … and is there a most efficient way (footprint-speaking) to function?
• In what kind of housing do most people live ? What is their energetic efficiency, the average density of population..
• Etc…

Addressing these collective challenges will require the launch of large-scale, society-transforming projects. Many obstacles will come up in the process — but just to name 2 that appear most problematic:

• Huge political courage and momentum to a) acknowledge the “burning platform” and b) overcome skepticism; arguably orders of magnitude higher than anything that has ever been seen so far,
• Huge investments to finance the infrastructural work required, tightly linked to the courage and momentum mentioned above.

4. Final thoughts:

We are overshooting Earth resources by a x1,75 factor: it is of course deeply concerning and everybody needs to hear the wakeup call rather sooner than later.

At the same time 1,75 is still in the “ball park area” of “1” : what I mean by that is that we are not yet lost in the middle of the ocean with an overshoot factor of x10 or x1000

That said, next 50 years will see an unprecedented population surge, so the “demographic current” is taking us away from equilibrium; we need to factor this into our efforts before all else.

Lastly, there is still a fair amount of resistance to these concepts in various areas of the world, including in most prominent countries (as sadly demonstrated by the US), so education will continue to be key

For those reasons I believe we need to avoid sliding into panic, but rather do 3 things:

1. Encourage individuals from all countries to start doing the “little things” that can already slow down and even stabilize the process; let everyone choose their topics and set their pace,
2. Focus on planting the seed deep in the next generation (my kids are 3 and 1) so that we no longer have the painful “climate-change-skeptic” conversation in 2050, but rather have a long-list of automatic (and virtuous) behaviors in place
3. At country level, take every occasions when we “build or rebuild stuff” to give absolute priority to sustainability: after all there are not many houses, buildings or infrastructures that can go 50 years without being deeply revamped.

So this is the roadmap for the next 2 or 3 generations; will it be sufficient or fast enough? Maybe, or maybe not. If we are lucky nothing catastrophic will occur by then. The planet, for sure, will not stop spinning anytime soon, and I choose to believe that societies can drastically evolve in a few generations.

Over the last million years, multiple ice ages have rendered the UK on-and-off accessible by foot from mainland Europe; science explains that oceanic current that regulates Europe’s temperature can (and has repeatedly) stopped “overnight” due to changes in environnemental conditions, leading to temperature drop of 20+°C and the massive formation of glaciers, thus drastically lowering see level.

Will our great-grand kids get a chance to drive from Paris to London?

Main sources:

Organization and data behind “overshoot day”

• Main portal: https://www.overshootday.org/
• To explore data : http://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/exploreData
• 2019 overshoot day publication
• If you want to calculate your own overshoot day (mine is june 20th; France is May 14th)

Carbone4 study on requirements to meet 2050 objectives: “Faire sa part”

About “how fast can society change in a few generations”: see this blog post from economist Thomas Piketty, describing how the US have had a near 80% tax level on inheritance for the most part of XXth century, as an attempt to lower inequalities