"Since then we've seen astonishing technological innovations that have increased our ability to obtain resources, so the carrying capacity has actually gone up," Dr Phillips said. People started getting concerned in the 1970s that the number of humans on the planet was increasing too fast, according to evolutionary biologist Ben Phillips of the University of Melbourne. Things that used to kill us don't, and we can exploit resources much further afield and faster than during all of our history.īut, in animals at least, then comes the crash - where the ratio of animals to resources becomes so skewed that a period of fierce competition for limited resources breaks out, and only the fittest survive.Īfter the crash, populations tend to slowly recover, but never reach as high as they were during the first boom. In the case of humans, modern medicine and technology have facilitated that boom. Typically, the population of an invasive species that moves into a new area and is freed from predation will boom - it expands beyond what is called the "carrying capacity", and diminishes the food and resources it needs to sustain itself in the process. Population-dynamics science tells us two things broadly about invasive animal population trends. So if we're consuming Earth's resources faster than they're replenishing, why haven't we run out yet? We ain't nothin' but animals While Kyrgyzstan makes it to Boxing Day, no country's people consume resources at a slower rate than they can be replaced. And if we all lived like Qataris, who overshot on February 11, we'd need 8.7 Earths to provide the goods. If everyone on the globe lived like us, we'd have broken the bank in 90 days. They use that data to calculate the average consumption or "footprint" per capita for more than 200 countries, and the Earth.Īnd while the world will make it to July this year, Australia's Earth Overshoot Day flew by on March 31. The Global Footprint Network bases its calculations primarily on United Nations data, and consider consumption of things like crops for food and fibres, as well as livestock, seafood, timber and forestry harvest, urban infrastructure development, and preservation of carbon sinks like forests.
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