‼️ Today is 🇩🇪's widely reported "overshoot day" - and it's true: we overuse natural resources, substantially. Six of nine planetary boundaries are transgressed, some by a lot. This endangers planetary stability, as numerous indicators with strongly negative trends show.
But what most don't know (but @christianschwaegerl investigated and highlighted last year) are some important shortcomings of this popular metric ...
Namely: the overshoot mostly reflects how much forest we'd need to compensate our CO2 emissions (see figure; minus ocean uptake). Fair enough - though nobody suggests this is how to combat climate heating. But what is more: according to this accounting, with all demands not CO2 we'd still be well within the limits. That reveals methodological weaknesses: the computation does not include damages to ecological networks, habitat degradation, pollution, excess nitrogen, water withdrawals ...
PS: This illustrates we still urgently need a systematic, more comprehensive assessment of the human destabilisation of Earth beyond climate, with a focus on biosphere integrity. Much of Earth system science and Earth system policy is still geocentric - but we need to be biocentric (including anthropocentric approaches).
Starting later this year, we plan to publish annual "Planetary Health Checks" building on the planetary boundaries framework. We're currently ramping up the team.
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