Country Overshoot Days

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.

To calculate a country’s Overshoot Day, we use the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts’ previous year’s edition. The 2019 edition features data from 2016, as data is reported to the United Nations with some time delay.

Let’s take Switzerland, for example, using the 2019 edition (with data for 2016):

• The Ecological Footprint for Switzerland is 4.64 gha per person (in 2016)
• Global biocapacity is 1.63 gha per person (in 2016)

Therefore, it would take (4.64/ 1.63) = 2.8 Earths if everyone lived like the Swiss,
OR
we can determine Switzerland’s overshoot day as 366 * (1.63/ 4.64) = 129th day in the year. The 129th day of 2020 is the 8th 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) do not have an overshoot day and are therefore not included in our list below. In leap years, we compare the date against 366 days of the year.

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.