Humanity eats the planet

5.38.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Sat 14th Oct 2006

Earth

On Monday humanity started eating the planet according to new research I have just be given. Research by the US-based Global Footprint Network in partnership with NEF (New Economics Foundation) and Best Foot Forward reveals that humanity has used up what nature can renew this year and is now eating into its 'ecological capital'.

Each year, the day that the global economy starts to operate with an ecological deficit is designated as 'ecological debt day'. This marks the date that the planet's environmental resource flow goes into the red and we begin operating on a non-existent environmental overdraft.

The fact that this year, ecological debt day falls on 9 October, only three quarters of the way through the year, means that we are living well beyond our environmental means. This leads, in effect, to a net depletion of the resources.

The day that we begin living beyond our environmental means is creeping ever earlier in the year as human consumption grows:

Humanity first went into global ecological debt in 1987, with the first ecological debt day on 19 December that year; by 1995 it had jumped a month forward to 21 November; now, new estimates based on the latest available data indicate that in 2006, we ran out of ecological resources on 9 October.