The world today enters ecological debt on Earth Overshoot Day, by exhausting the planet’s annual natural resources.
The figures come from the international sustainability organization Global Footprint Network, according to which humanity is using the planet’s natural resources 73% faster than the planet can regenerate them, equivalent to the use of 1.73 Earths.
According to the organization, the consequences are dire: deforestation, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, and the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
If Earth’s overshoot continues to increase at current levels, the ecological debt will grow at a rate of 0.73 planets per year, leading to an increase in CO2 concentration, a gas that contributes to global warming.
Portugal, alone, exhausted the planet’s available annual natural resources in 2026 on May 7, four days after the European Union as a whole.
For the Portuguese environmental association Zero, the “humanity must quicken its pace and promote the necessary changes,” starting, for example, by imposing a carbon tax of about €90 per tonne on all activities emitting greenhouse gases, allowing to defer the ecological debt by two months.
Reducing meat consumption by half, and replacing it with a vegetarian diet, would enable delaying the use of ecological credit by 17 days, with 10 of those days resulting from avoided methane emissions, according to the same association.
The Global Footprint Network emphasizes that the ecological debt accumulated with the planet is already 20.6 years of overshoot, the time that would be required for Earth’s regeneration if such a thing were possible, which the organization considers unlikely.
