Ecological Overshoot

Ecological overshoot is the human consumption of self-producing and replenishable natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, combined with entropic waste production in excess of the Earth's assimilative and processing capacity.

The three levers

There are three critical components to overshoot: population, consumption (energy/material), and waste generation — together, "economic throughput." Growing population acts to multiply resource consumption and waste production. Ecological impact is profoundly unequal: a small, high-income fraction of the global population is responsible for the vast majority of the damage, which disproportionately harms the relatively poorer majority. Individuals with incomes in the top 10% are responsible for 25–43% of environmental impact and 47% of CO2 emissions, while the bottom 10% contribute just 3–5%.

Scale of the trajectory

It took H. sapiens roughly 350,000 years to reach a global population of 1 billion (1820), and just over 200 years to go from 1 billion to 8 billion. In that same 200-year period, fossil energy use increased 1,300-fold, fuelling a 100-fold increase in real gross world product. Far from "decoupling" from nature, contemporary civilisation is ever more deeply embedded in ecosystems and the lithosphere — growth is being financed by drawing down cumulative stores of natural resources (fish stocks, forests, soils, fossil fuels, rare minerals), not by any genuine substitution of resource use.

Planetary Boundaries

The changes being tracked under the Planetary Boundaries framework are the delayed, systemic expression of this overshoot: seven of nine boundaries are now assessed as crossed.

See also

Levers of Overshoot · Planetary Boundaries · Human Behavioural Crisis · MTI Society