on May 15, Italy runs out of natural resources available for 2023- Corriere.it

Today, May 15, 2023, is theOvershoot Day — at least for Italy.

It’s only been five months, yet we already have finished all the resources that ideally the planet has made available to Italians for this year.

This is attested by the Global footprint networka non-profit association that not only calculates the situation globally, but also that of individual countries around the world.

Compared to last year, we haven’t made any progress. Indeed, the dates have remained almost unchanged.

A year ago, like today, together with Chile and the Bahamas, we exhausted the natural resources available for the current year.

Of course, there are those who are put worse than us. States like Qatar or Luxembourg they sold out of their annual supplies as early as early February.

But there is also who is more virtuous: Indonesia, Ecuador and Jamaica they manage to make it to December without running out of resources.

In principle, from the table of the Global footprint network it can be seen how most of the countries of the world “celebrate” the overshoot day between March and early June. And these tend to be European countries: Belgium (March 26), Denmark (March 28) and Finland (March 31) do worse than us. But also Sweden, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, France and even Spain and Portugal, even if only for a few days.

What do these data mean? That in a year, Italy consumes 167% more of the goods it should manage. And that – like last year – if the whole world behaved like us, 2.7 lands would be needed to be able to support everyone’s requests.

Globally, it is estimated that overshoot day will come on this year July 27: a date that comes earlier every year. The exact date will be announced on June 5th.

Last year Earth overshoot day fell on July 28, the year before on the 29th. The year before that, in 2020, it was August 22nd. But let’s talk about an exceptional year. In fact, going even further back, we discover that in 2019 it had fallen at the end of July, exactly as in the post-Covid years.
A more virtuous behavior would allow us to gain days and save resources. The overshoot day on May 15 tells us instead that the situation hasn’t worsened, but it hasn’t even improved compared to a year ago.