Yesterday, the availability of natural resources for the entire year 2023 for Italy ended. The finding comes from the Global Footprint Network, a think-tank that every year is responsible for estimating the day each country runs out of the resources the planet provides, the so-called Overshoot Day. This day marks the depletion of the renewable resources the Earth is capable of regenerating in a year. The date of global Overshoot Day, on the other hand, which changes from year to year and in 2022 had fallen on July 28, never so early in the year (50 years earlier, in 1972, it fell on December 14), will most likely fall on July 27 this year. The calculation of the date of Overshoot Day is made on the basis of data provided by the United Nations in the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, which takes into account activities such as agriculture, construction, energy production greenhouse gas emissions and the management of urban environments and forests for the period from 1961 to 2018, excluding, therefore, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Italy's situation is particularly serious when compared on a global scale. Although Italy is, in fact, a country in the midst of depopulation, it continues to have an outsized per capita ecological footprint. The latter, which for an Italian amounts to 4.3 global hectares, when divided by the world's average biocapacity, i.e., the share of resources available to each inhabitant of the Earth, equal to 1.6 global hectares, yields the worrying result of 2.68. This figure indicates, in practical terms, that should the entire world population adopt the lifestyle of the Italians, we would need nearly 2.7 planets to live.
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