Overshoot Day: The sooner, the worse

A statement by Moritz Lehmkuhl, founder and CEO of ClimatePartner.

The Global Footprint Network has announced 5 May as the date for this year's German Overshoot Day. In Switzerland it is 11 May, in Great Britain 19 May. According to this calculation, we consume many times the resources and cause many times the emissions as we can offset by the biocapacity available to us. This means that anything we consume or emit for the rest of the year after these dates will be at the expense of future generations. We are all living on credit.

The climate debt trap

This is why the German Constitutional Court's ruling on the German government's climate action law is so important – not only for the country but as a global milestone decision. It states that our current lifestyle must not be at the expense of the future of younger people. But that is exactly what is happening now, and the date of Overshoot Day is both a receipt and a ticket.

In order to get out of the climate debt crisis, we must strive for the restructuring of our consumption-oriented economy in the direction of resource conservation, decarbonisation, efficiency improvement and raw material circulation - both the economic sector and each individual private person.

The climate-neutral path

The consumption of resources always causes CO₂ emissions. And vice versa: when we emit CO₂ into the atmosphere, we need resources such as forests, soils or bodies of water to absorb and offset the CO₂.       

Climate neutrality therefore not only describes a goal of its balance between emission generation and saving. It also shows the way in which we can make better use of our resources. Those who continuously measure and calculate their emissions, implement more and more reduction measures and only offset what then still remains unavoidable, usually also derive a lot of potential for resource conservation and increased efficiency from this process.