Country Overshoot Days

COVID-19 IMPACT
We have received many inquiries about the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on each country’s Ecological Footprint and Overshoot Day. It is too challenging to tell with a reasonable degree of confidence as events are still unfolding rather unpredictably and data on these significant changes are still being collected. For more information on how to “now-cast” countries’ Ecological Footprints to the present, see the box on the right.

A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in this country.

We determine the country overshoot days in 2021 using the 2021 edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, which features Ecological Footprint and biocapacity data from 1961 to the latest data-year of 2017. Typically, there is a three to four-year lag between the latest data-year and the present due to the UN’s reporting process.

Let’s take Switzerland’s 2021 overshoot day, for example, using the 2021 edition (with data for 2017):

• The Ecological Footprint for Switzerland is 4.47 gha per person (in 2017)
• Global biocapacity is 1.6 gha per person (in 2017)

Therefore, it would take (4.47/ 1.6) = 2.79 Earths if everyone lived like the Swiss,
OR
we can determine Switzerland’s overshoot day as 365 * (1.6/4.47) = 131th day in the year. The 131th day of 2021 is the 11th of May, Switzerland’s Overshoot Day.

Not all countries will have an overshoot day. By way of the country overshoot equation above, a country will only have an overshoot day if their Ecological Footprint per person is greater than global biocapacity per person (1.63 gha). Countries whose Ecological Footprint per person are less than global biocapacity per person (1.63 gha) and do not have an overshoot day are therefore not included in our list below. In leap years, we compare the date against 366 days of the year, rather than the usual 365.

All countries are not represented in the infographic. The table below provides a more complete list of country overshoot days:

Dive into your country’s Ecological Footprint and biocapacity data at data.footprintnetwork.org.