This year, the world will be in a situation of “ecological debt” for 156 days. It would take us 1.75 earth to regenerate what humanity consumes in terms of surface.
by
From Thursday, July 28, the world lives on credit until the end of the year. The “day of surpassing”, dates from which humanity has consumed the whole of ecosystems can regenerate in one year, has just been reached, according to the calculations of the American organization Global Footprint Network. The fateful date arrives a day earlier than last year, confirming that the lull caused by the health crisis was an ephemeral episode – in 2020, under the effect of health confinements and restrictions, the day of the overtaking had decreased from Three weeks compared to 2019.
The WWF association, at the origin of the communication campaign around the day of the day of exceeding, This does not recall that “the only periods of lull have not been chosen or anticipated: they correspond to the energy crises (1973, 1979), financial (2008) and sanitary (2020). “Pierre Cannet, director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF France, believes that this day of surpassing illustrates that” our system has stagnated since the Paris Agreement period “.
” There is a finitude which must be taken note “
For Laetitia Mailhes, spokesperson for Global Footprint Network, this year once again confirms “increased competition for access to resources on which we depend”, which raises the question whether humanity will be able to Term “to do what it takes to experience according to the ecological budget of our planet. There is a finitude which must be taken in.”
As usual, these calculations highlight that not all countries contribute in the same proportions to the global ecological debt. Because, if the whole of humanity lived as French, the day of the surpassing would have been reached from May 5. By following the North American lifestyle, the deadline would have been advanced by 2 months on March 13, and it would have been reached on June 2 for the lifestyle of the Chinese population.
However, the methodology used to calculate this overcoming day does not make consensus. Aurélien Boutaud, researcher associated with the CNRS and author of the ecological footprint (La Découverte, 2018), explains that “the ecological footprint is a very synthetic indicator and therefore has a lot of advantages” especially because “he aggregates thousands of statistics whose impact he will translate into a common unit of measure “.
Nevertheless, this tool has “certain drawbacks, in particular some approximations, and there are ignored environmental aspects” or indirectly taken into account, such as the protection of biodiversity. In addition, the indicator is “very anthropocentive, we start from the principle that biocapacity is entirely dedicated to the survival of humans”, he notes.
You have 33.58% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.