Editorial - Year after year, seven Earths too many

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In Eric Carle's children's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, everything starts innocently, as nature intended. A caterpillar hatches from an egg, gets hungry, and eats its way through the week. It begins with an apple, but day by day it eats more and more – typical of a growth phase. The apple turns into two pears, then three plums, until on a Saturday it greedily devours cake, ice cream, sausage, and cheese – entirely caterpillar-unfriendly foods. After that come the stomach aches.

On Luxembourg's "Overshoot Day", this stomach ache was, mathematically speaking, already reached on 17 February. If the entire world population lived like our small country, we would need between seven and eight Earths. Every year, this news reaches us sometime in February; and every year, it is followed by a brief shock over a number that, in truth, should no longer surprise anyone.

A quick word about this so-called Earth Overshoot Day: it is calculated by the Global Footprint Network. The Earth's biocapacity, i.e. what it can regenerate in a year, is divided by humanity's ecological footprint and multiplied by 365 days. As of this date – i.e. two days ago – we are consuming more than can be replenished within the same year.

I still remember my first ecologial footprint test in secondary school. None of the results in the class would have fit on a single Earth. As a teenager, this confrontation with Luxembourgish, or, more broadly, Western consumer behaviour hit me for real. Recently, out of curiosity, I repeated the calculation, Curious, in the good hope that I was by now living far more sustainably, having, like everyone else, been well-informed about the issue of climate change.

The result was sobering. Below the Luxembourg average, yes, but still above the global average of 6.41 tonnes of CO₂ per year. I am left with the question: what more can I do as an individual to push Earth Overshoot Day back and do something good for nature? A look at the solutions compiled by Global Footprint Network shows that much of the responsibility does ultimately not just lie in the hands of individuals alone, but rests with governments, international institutions and businesses, too.