If Italy were to live within its environmental means, then today it would have run out of resources. According to the Global Footprint Network research organisation, Italy hit its overshoot day on Sunday.
Italy has already used up its resources for this year if the nation were living within its environmental means the Global Footprint Network research organisation has said. It hit its overshoot day on May 15th.
This means that, per person, Italian residents have used as much from nature as the planet renews per person in the entire year. If everyone in the world lived like people do in Italy, humanity would need approximately 2.7 earths. In other words, Italy needs 5.3 ‘Italies’ to meet its residents’ demands in the long term.
The Global Footprint Network calculates the ecological footprint of individual countries all over the world. The overshoot day for the planet as a whole was July 29, 2021.
Related article: FAO says deforestation needs to stop
Parents for Future
Parents for Future (PFF) is a movement which supports the Fridays for Future network of young activists. Barbara Zampa of the Italian PFF told ANSA, “We are worried about the data and even more worried by the political incoherence with which they are being handled.”
“We are seeing foolish decisions being made that are disconnected from scientific data, incoherent with respect to the possible solutions and profoundly unjust with regards to the peoples who are already in the greatest difficulty because of the climate emergency and with regards to future generations.
“Mothers and fathers usually want to leave behind something for their children. Here we are depriving them of a present and a future. Unfortunately, when faced with calculations and numbers, it does not matter whether you are talking about overshoot day, the climate clock, net zero or the 1.5 C° threshold.
“What makes the difference is the seriousness with which these figures are taken in and the seriousness with which reparative and preventative measures are put into practice.”
What does overshoot mean?
Essentially, overshoot is when a country has consumed all the energy Earth can generate in that year. The country then moves into an ecological deficit.
Running an ecological deficit like this means that we are not only consuming the annual “interest” on our natural capital, but also depleting it by taking resources from the future to pay for the present. The effects of this global ecological overshoot are already evident in the form of deforestation, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity and the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Zampa said we need a “paradigm shift” to take humankind towards an economic and social model that respects the planet’s limits. She said PFF Italia’s campaigning includes efforts to save the EU Taxonomy of Sustainable Investments from “greenwashing” .
The European Commission has proposed classifying new gas cogeneration plants as green until the end of 2025 if they replace coal plants. This despite the fact that methane’s impact on climate change is up to 84 times greater than CO2 in a 20-year timeframe.
Environmentalists and scientists have blasted this as absurd.
