Status: 03.05.2022 4:35 p.m
According to environmentalists, as of Wednesday Germany has already used up all the resources that would be available for the whole year if they were used sustainably. That’s a day earlier than last year.
According to calculations by environmentalists, Germany will already have used up its ecological resources for 2022 tomorrow this year. While the global Earth Overshoot Day will be reached in midsummer, the German Earth Overshoot Day this time falls on May 4, as the Global Footprint Network has calculated. Last year it was May 5th. 20 years ago, global exhaustion day was still in October.
Reasons for this year’s early date are, among other things, the still far too high energy consumption, the high CO2 emissions in traffic and in factory farming as well as the pollution of soil, air and groundwater.
“Over the limit”
“World Exhaustion Day makes it clear once again how much we live over the limit, waste our scarce resources and how badly we continue to treat our ecosystems,” said German WWF Nature Conservation Director Christoph Heinrich. Mathematically, the German share of the earth’s natural resources was already used up after the first four months of the year. “If all countries in the world were to ‘budget’ like Germany, it would take more than three earths.”
The Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation Germany (BUND) declared that the early German Earth Overshoot Day was an alarm signal and an indictment of failed environmental and nature conservation policies in recent years.
“We live on credit and at the expense of the people in the Global South,” said Federal Managing Director Antje von Broock. “We all contribute to plundering the planet with the way we live, work, consume, eat, build or travel.” The war in Ukraine also shows how scarce and how precious the finite resources are.
required speed limit
Von Broock called on the federal government to equip the planned energy efficiency law with binding targets. Effective energy-saving guidelines would have to be defined for the individual sectors: “Measures that are easy to implement and take immediate effect, such as a general speed limit on motorways, should be introduced quickly.” Legal requirements are necessary for the rapid energetic modernization of buildings. In agriculture, the energy-intensive use of fertilizers must be reduced.
According to calculations by researchers, on the “World Exhaustion Day” proclaimed by environmental protection organizations, all resources and buffers that the earth could replace naturally have been used up.