The day of the planet’s ecological overshoot, when humanity exhausts the Earth’s annual renewable resources and begins to live on “credit,” is marked on July 30.
According to data from the international organization ‘Global Footprint Network’, the planet will enter overshoot on July 30, a few days later than in 2025, when the date was marked on July 24.
The organization explains that “the apparent later date” for exhausting Earth’s resources this year is based on a revision of the data used to calculate the overshoot day, which also leads to recalculations of data from previous years.
In 2026, the organization explained, the main change for calculation purposes related to the upward revision of the oceans’ capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, along with a few other small adjustments, which “pushed the Earth’s Overshoot Day” six days forward compared to 2025.
“This change reflects updated information, not an actual reduction of overshoot,” the organization emphasizes.
On the contrary, although it occurs later than in 2025, this year’s date represents “the highest level of ecological overshoot ever recorded.”
Exhausting the resources that the planet is capable of regenerating within a year, five months before the end of 2026, demonstrates, according to the ‘Global Footprint Network’, “how much the economy depends on the overuse of nature.”
According to the calculations of the international sustainability organization, humanity is currently using natural resources 73% faster than the planet can regenerate them, which equates to the use of 1.73 Earths.
“It is the highest level of overshoot in the history of humanity. This level of overuse is possible because natural capital can be exhausted. Such depletion threatens the long-term security of resources. The visible consequences are deforestation, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, contributing to more frequent extreme climate events and to the decline in food production,” reads the statement from the ‘Global Footprint Network’.
The organization stresses that the ecological debt accumulated to the planet is already 20.6 years of overshoot, the time that would be needed for Earth to regenerate, if that were possible, which the ‘Global Footprint Network’ says is unlikely.
If overshoot continues to rise at current levels, the ecological debt will grow at a rate of 0.73 planets per year, with the most measurable consequence being the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In 2026, the organization will focus the Earth’s Overshoot Day on how countries are responding to this problem, assessing the priority given to the matter and how they are preparing economies for a “future inevitably marked” by climate disruption and resource scarcity.
Portugal signed its overshoot day on May 7, two days later than in 2025, according to the ‘Global Footprint Network’.
The country begins to exceed the resources available to sustain the Portuguese lifestyle with less than five months of the year having passed. This means that if every person on Earth lived like an average Portuguese person, humanity would require about 2.9 planets to meet its resource needs.
The result places Portugal around the European Union (EU) average, which this year had the overshoot day on May 3, a slight improvement also compared with last year.
