AS EARTH OVERSHOOT DAY APPROACHES, NOW IS THE TIME TO TAKE STOCK OF WHERE WE ARE AND HOW WE CAN KEEP THE MOMENTUM MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, SAYS KATE STRONG
THE AUTHOR Kate Strong is a Sustainability Consultant, Performance Coach and host of the Strong Voice podcast.
Should we believe what we see on television and read in the newspapers – that the whole world is going green?
Companies boast about being carbon neutral and sometimes even carbon positive. Sustainabilitydriven activities are seeing a record number of people getting involved, including the Final Straw Foundation’s beach clean-ups (finalstrawfoundation.org), which have seen volunteer numbers grow by 146 per cent over the past four years.
Longer-term lifestyle changes are also on the increase, with over 629,000 people having pledged to go vegan in January 2022, with 24 per cent of that group being motivated by global health. We, on the whole, are doing good things.
The UK is ranked 17th in the UN’s Sustainability Development Report, achieving just under 80 per cent of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) laid out by the UN. The UK is ahead of Japan, New Zealand, most of the South American and African countries and also the USA.
Yet, this leaderboard doesn’t paint the whole picture. Yes, it’s important to know how each country ranks against each other, but it doesn’t solve the problem that Greta Thunberg succinctly points out – the house is burning. If one country is struggling, then we all are struggling.
In it together
We can’t keep treating the climate crisis as a race to the podium, where each country is battling for the gold medal in minimum climate impact – we need to change the rules of the game. Personally, I think that striving for a carbon neutral lifestyle is impossible. Every time I turn on my laptop, put on my jeans and jumper and leave my house, I am creating an environmental impact. The mere process of breathing produces waste and uses up natural resources.
Fortunately, I am not alone in this thinking, with the focus slowly shifting away from measuring carbon produced and sequestered (a number that is hard to imagine and apply in our daily actions) and towards measuring the number of days we over- or under-consume.
Scientists have calculated how much activity the earth can sustain and replenish, calling it the global biocapacity. Biocapacity is the area of productive land available to produce resources or absorb carbon dioxide waste, given current management practices.
Putting this data into an equation, we are able to calculate the amount of ecological resources the Ear
