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Footprint Network
A country’s overshoot day is the date on which Earth Overshoot Day would fall if all of humanity consumed like the people in that country.
Country overshoot days are published on January 1st of each year, using the latest year of the most recent National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts edition. Therefore, the 2024 country overshoot days are based on the 2023 edition. […]
March 14 marks the United States of America’s Overshoot Day for 2024. The Overshoot Day marks the date when our demand for ecological resources in a given year exceeds what our planet can regenerate in that year. This deficit arises from liquidating stocks of ecological resources and accumulating waste, primarily greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. In 2023, Earth’s Overshoot Day was August 2nd.
Not all countries have an overshoot day, though. If a country’s Ecological Footprint per person is smaller than global biocapacity per person (1.5 gha), then the world would not use up the entire regenerative resource budget for the year within a year, if all humanity lived like them. These countries therefore do not have an overshoot day and are listed as “none” in the data tables, or are excluded as in the table below. In leap years, as is one this year, we calculate the date based on a 366 day-long year, rather than the usual 365.
The Conversation
[…] As you know, one species – ours – is exceptionally good at changing our environment to suit us. The problem is, we’re now too good at it. We chop down forests, remove mountains to get at ore bodies, take over grassland, fish out entire seas, create and unleash novel chemicals and pump huge quantities of nutrients from fertiliser into the system. These and many more undermine the hidden life support system on which we rely. […]
Here’s the sum total of our impact on the planet. You can see the areas we’re still within safe limits – and those where we are well past.
If we keep our activities to a safe level, the sheer exuberance of life and the planet’s own processes can handle it. But in six out of nine vital life support systems, we have blown well past the safe zone. And we’re now in the danger zone, where we – as well as every other species – are now at risk.
Nature
As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion.
The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional.
CNN
Are you frightened by climate change? Do you worry about what sort of world we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren? In the words of science writer and author of “The Uninhabitable Earth” David Wallace-Wells, “No matter how well informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.”
I would put it even more strongly.
If the fracturing of our once stable climate doesn’t terrify you, then you don’t fully understand it. The reality is that, as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never — in its entire history — heated up as rapidly as it is doing now. Nor have greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere ever seen such a precipitous hike.
Salon
Dr. Kevin Trenberth is one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change…
"Climate change is clearly well underway and represents a major, even existential threat that is not being adequately addressed," Trenberth writes. "Improvements are much needed in expressing why and how the climate is changing from human activities."
He asserts that when it comes to fixing climate change, humanity is missing a key point, one that he has repeatedly emphasized throughout his career: Warming and heating are not the same thing. As Trenberth explained … if our species does not soon fully grasp both this fact and its implications, the consequences will be disastrous.
Reuters
The world is on the verge of a fourth mass coral bleaching event which could see wide swathes of tropical reefs die, including parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
Marine biologists are on high alert following months of record-breaking ocean heat fuelled by climate change and the El Nino climate pattern.
"It's looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year," said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.
e are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet," he said.
The Washington Post
Seven months after Florida corals faced what scientists called their worst bleaching event ever, a similar emergency grips the Great Barrier Reef: Its famed corals are under unprecedented and in some spots fatal stress as relentless summer heat in Australia stretches into early fall.
The bleaching event appears likely to be the worst on record in southern sections of the 1,400-mile-long reef, and could bring the first significant coral fatalities observed there. And in other regions, what is the fifth major bleaching event within nine years could serve as a test of how resilient the world wonder will be going forward…
On the Great Barrier Reef, the relatively rapid succession of such extreme bleaching events is a clear sign of human-caused climate change, said David Wachenfeld, research program director at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. There is no evidence of mass bleaching occurring before 1998 but, since an episode that year, marine heat waves have returned with increasing frequency, in 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022.
Hakai Magazine
In the northern hemisphere, the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. In the Caribbean, coral reefs sat in sweltering water for months—stewing in a dangerous marine heatwave that started earlier, lasted longer, and climbed to higher temperatures than any seen in the region before. In some places, the water was over 32 °C—as toasty as a hot tub. Ever since the water started to warm, researchers and conservationists have been anxiously watching to see how the debilitating heat has affected the region’s corals.
For many Caribbean corals, last year’s heat proved too much to bear. The more time corals spend in hot water, the more likely they are to bleach, turning white as they expel the single-celled algae that live within their tissues. Without these symbiotic algae—and the energy they provide through photosynthesis—bleached corals starve. Survival becomes a struggle, and what had been a healthy thicket of colorful coral can turn into a tangle of skeletons.
Corals can recover from bleaching. But while some Caribbean corals survived last year’s bleaching and others were unaffected, multitudes perished. And for many corals, the harrowing experience isn’t even over.
New Scientist
The sea ice that encircles Antarctica has reached near-record low levels for the third year in a row, raising concerns that the ice has undergone a permanent “regime shift” driven by climate change – with alarming consequences for ice shelves, Antarctic ecosystems and the global climate. Researchers say it remains unclear whether such a shift has occurred, but we may see more evidence in a matter of months.
Antarctic sea ice has long defied expectations. Modellers projecting its decline were flummoxed when sea ice cover increased up to 2015, even as sea ice in the Arctic declined. Then, sea ice cover fell sharply below average the following year, reaching a record low early in 2017. That started to look like a trend as the ice set another record low in 2022, then another in early 2023. Researchers were shocked when the ice failed to recover during the Antarctic winter in the middle of last year, remaining so far below average that “our statistical models didn’t work anymore”, says Edward Doddridge at the University of Tasmania in Australia.
In 2024, sea ice cover has again shrunk to a near record low, reaching a minimum extent of just 1.99 million square kilometres on 20 February – the second lowest figure on record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US. Now, “all eyes are on winter sea ice”, says Doddridge. “If 2024 is like last year, there’s going to be a lot of evidence suggesting that Antarctic sea ice has changed, potentially irreversibly.”
The Atlantic
Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January. The temperatures are also part of a decades-long hot streak in the oceans. “What we used to consider extreme is no longer an extreme today,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me.
The situation is expected to worsen. Research suggests that by the end of the century, much of the ocean could be in a permanent heat wave relative to historical thresholds, depending on the quantity of greenhouse gases that humans emit. Many other changes will unfold alongside those hot ocean temperatures: stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels, unmanageable conditions for marine life. Our seas, in other words, will be altered within decades.
PBS News Hour
As the Arctic warms, its mighty rivers are changing in ways that could have vast consequences – not only for the Arctic region but for the world.
Rivers represent the land branch of the earth’s hydrological cycle. As rain and snow fall, rivers transport freshwater runoff along with dissolved organic and particulate materials, including carbon, to coastal areas. With the Arctic now warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the world, the region is seeing more precipitation and the permafrost is thawing, leading to stronger river flows.
We’re climate scientists who study how warming is influencing the water cycle and ecosystems. In a new study using historical data and sophisticated computer models of Earth’s climate and hydrology, we explored how climate change is altering Arctic rivers.
We found that thawing permafrost and intensifying storms will change how water moves into and through Arctic rivers. These changes will affect coastal regions, the Arctic Ocean and, potentially, the North Atlantic, as well as the climate.
Yale Climate Connections
The second month of 2024 was Earth’s warmest February since global record-keeping began in 1850, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, or NCEI, reported Mar. 14. The December-February period (summer in the Southern Hemisphere, winter in the Northern Hemisphere) was also the warmest on record.
Global weather agencies were in agreement on the February record, including NASA, which placed February at 1.67 degrees Celsius (3.01 °F) above the 1880-1899 period, its best estimate for when preindustrial temperatures last occurred. This beat the previous record from February 2016 by 0.07 degrees Celsius (0.13 °F). February 2024 had the second-greatest departure from average of any month in the NASA database, behind September 2023. The Japan Meteorological Agency and the European Copernicus Climate Change Service also rated February 2024 as the warmest February on record.
NPR News
The oil and gas industry may be emitting about three-times the amount of climate-warming methane than government estimates show, according to a new study in Nature.
Methane is the main component of natural gas, and it is also produced when extracting crude oil. Methane is among the greenhouse gasses heating the planet, and it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The study's researchers used airplanes to gather 986,238 measurements of methane emissions from six domestic oil and gas production areas. The data include about half the country's onshore oil production and 29% of natural gas production. Then researchers combined that aerial data with information from sites on the ground, including wells, compressor stations, gas processing plants and pipelines.
WBTS (NBC Boston)
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in an effort to protect beachfront homes in Salisbury, Massachusetts, and it took just one storm to bring residents back to reality.
Sunday's storm, like so many before, proved costly on Salisbury Beach, but for a different reason. On Thursday, residents had just finished trucking in 15,000 tons of sand, paying the $600,000 price tag out of their own pockets.
Just four days later, half of the sand washed away. […]
Residents hope the state can help pay for a more permanent solution.
AP News
Dao Bao Tran and her brother Do Hoang Trung, 11-year-old twins growing up on a rickety houseboat in the Mekong Delta, have dreams. Tran loves K-pop, watches videos at night to learn Korean and would love to visit Seoul. Trung wants to be a singer.
But their hopes are “unrealistic,” said Trung: “I know I’ll end up going to the city to try and make a living.”
Such dreams have a way of dissipating in southern Vietnam’s Mekong, one of the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world.
BBC News
Bananas are set to get more expensive as climate change hits a much-loved fruit […]
But while banana supplies can cope with short-term weather events like this, experts are concerned about the growing threats from a warming world, and from the diseases that are spreading in its wake.
"I think climate change is really an enormous threat to the banana sector," said [Pascal] Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group that brings together industry stakeholders including retailers, producer countries, exporters and research institutions.
New York Times
By this time of the year, rain should be drenching large swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Instead, a punishing drought has kept the rains at bay, creating dry conditions for fires that have engulfed hundreds of square miles of the rainforest that do not usually burn.
The fires have turned the end of the dry season in the northern part of the giant rainforest into a crisis. Firefighters have struggled to contain enormous blazes that have sent choking smoke into cities across South America.
A record number of fires so far this year in the Amazon has also raised questions about what may be in store for the world’s biggest tropical rainforest when the dry season starts in June in the far larger southern part of the jungle.
University of Reading
Winter storms that provide crucial snow and rainfall to northern India are arriving significantly later in the year compared to 70 years ago, a new study has found, exacerbating the risk of catastrophic flooding while also reducing vital water supplies for millions of Indians.
The cyclonic storms, known as western disturbances, typically bring heavy snow to the Himalayas from December to March. This snowpack slowly melts in spring, providing a steady supply of irrigation water for wheat and other crops downstream.
The study, published today (Tuesday, 12 March 2024), in the journal Weather and Climate Dynamics, reveals western disturbances are occurring more often during India’s summer. Over the past 70 years, the storms have increased in frequency by 60% from April to July, reducing snowfall and increasing the risk of heavy flooding.
The New Republic
The European Environment Agency this week released a meticulous 300-page report on climate risks facing the EU, and it can be summed up thus: Without immediate and significant action, Southern Europe is screwed. There are other takeaways from the report, for sure, about climate threats throughout Europe. But in each of the five main risk categories the report evaluates—ecosystems, food, health, infrastructure, and economy and finance—Southern Europe is going to be hit the hardest. Over the coming decades, the region will lose “biodiversity/carbon sinks due to wildfires,” the flames and smoke of which will also affect human health. Southern Europe will see crops fail at higher rates than in areas farther north. It will experience “energy disruption due to heat and drought.” Its economy will suffer “due to water scarcity,” and its public finances will struggle due to large debt-to-gross domestic product ratios.
And action is urgently needed because Southern Europe is already seeing dramatic damage from climate change. In agriculture, all of Europe is going to see big shifts, such as reductions of up to 10–25 percent in corn and wheat yields; without policy intervention, the agricultural economic losses in the EU and the U.K. alone could top 65 billion euros (just over $71 billion) per year, per one study cited by the report. But Southern Europe is already seeing reductions that exceed those figures, “with wheat and maize yield reductions of over 60% in some … regions.” The report envisions risk to the European region in general as “substantial” in the current term, near term, and mid term, only rising to “critical” in the 2080s … except for Southern Europe, where the risk is rated as “critical” now, rising to “catastrophic” by the 2080s.
New York Times
President Biden spoke about global warming in stark terms during the State of the Union address Thursday night, ditching the more sterile term “climate change” to instead refer twice to the climate “crisis.”
“I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis,” Mr. Biden said to applause as he closed out his address to a joint session of Congress. […]
The only new proposal by the president was connected to his American Climate Corps, a national service program that trains 20,000 young adults for careers in clean energy and conservation. Mr. Biden said he wanted to triple the size of that program over the next decade.
AP News
[…] Voters are increasingly feeling the impacts of climate change after last summer’s extreme weather. [...]
Led by Biden, Democrats are talking about the climate crisis as an existential threat. Many want to pivot to wind, solar and renewable resources and phase out fossil fuels that feed warming. Some Democrats in oil- and gas-producing districts are walking a tightrope as their party moves away from fossil fuels but their communities depend on the industry. […]
Meanwhile, the National Republican Congressional Committee is spending against Democrats in oil and gas-producing districts who didn’t support a sprawling energy package by House Republicans. That legislation would undo virtually all of Biden’s agenda to address climate change, sharply increase domestic fossil fuel production, and ease permitting restrictions that delay pipelines and refineries.
Bloomberg
[…] You could be forgiven for thinking that climate change is high on the list of election issues, or for assuming that Americans who care about it will be running, not walking, to the ballot box to vote. […]
But while polling shows that many registered voters in the US consider the climate a top issue, there’s also evidence that few likely voters — people who have voted previously — identify climate change or other environmental issues as their main voting priority. In other words: “There are tens of millions of dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists out there who just aren’t voting,” says Nathaniel Stinnett, founder and executive director of the Environmental Voter Project, a Boston-based nonprofit. “The climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem.”
Stinnett started the Environmental Voter Project in 2017 to tackle this disconnect. The group focuses on “identifying people who care deeply about climate and the environment and aren’t voting, and then [turning] them into better voters,” he says.
Cal Matters
California will fail to meet its ambitious mandates for combating climate change unless the state almost triples its rate of reducing greenhouse gases through 2030, according to a new analysis released today.
After dropping during the pandemic, California’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases increased 3.4% in 2021, when the economy rebounded. The increase puts California further away from reaching its target mandated under state law: emitting 40% less in 2030 than in 1990 — a feat that will become more expensive and more difficult as time passes, the report’s authors told CalMatters.
“The fact that they need to increase the speed of reduction at about three times faster than they’re actually doing — that does not bode well,” said Stafford Nichols, a researcher at Beacon Economics, a Los Angeles-based economics research firm, and a co-author of the annual California Green Innovation Index released today.
The Guardian
In a world of monoculture cash crops, an innovative African project is persuading farmers to plant biodiverse forest gardens that feed the family, protect the soil and expand tree cover.
Could Trees for the Future (TREES) be a rare example of a mass reforestation campaign that actually works? The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) certainly thinks so and last month awarded it the status of World Restoration Flagship.
Since it was founded in 2015, the programme has planted tens of millions of trees each year in nine countries ranging from Senegal and Mali to Tanzania and Kenya. In less than 10 years, it has reportedly restored a combined area of more than 41,000 hectares, which is about seven times the size of Manhattan.
Columbia University Climate School
As the climate warms, the number of alien species on every continent is expected to increase 36 percent by 2050. Some alien species—that is, plants or animals that live outside their natural range—are invasive and can harm ecosystems and the areas they invade with serious impacts on the global food supply, medicines, water quality, biodiversity, and livelihoods.
Rising temperatures, increased CO2, and extreme weather that alters landscapes favor the spread of invasive species, which also exacerbate climate impacts by making habitats, agriculture and cities less resilient. […]
A warmer world is causing species to move northward and to higher elevations that were previously too cool for them. A U Mass study of 144 plants in the eastern U.S. found that with 2°C of warming, most of them will shift their ranges northeast by 213 kilometers, which could exacerbate the impacts of up to 40 invasive plants. In addition, some alien plants called “sleepers,” which were previously limited by climate conditions, may “wake up” as the climate changes to better suit them, and become invasive.
Warming temperatures mean earlier springs. Some invasive plants produce sprouts and leaves sooner than native plants, allowing them to gain earlier access to soil, nutrients and sunlight, monopolizing the resources.
Popular Mechanics
[A] new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association… states that renewables hit a milestone not seen since World War II this year. The U.S. added 32.4 gigawatts of solar capacity, which shatters the 2021 record of 23.6 gigawatts. That represents 52 percent of all added energy capacity in the U.S., with natural gas coming in a distant second with only 18 percent. […]
This solar boom can be attributed to a few things—chief among them the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which set aside roughly $369 billion for investment in and production of clean energy tech, as well as major incentives for installing rooftop solar. A dispute from a California-based solar manufacturer in 2022 also set back projects that finally came to completion in 2023, which helped further boost the year’s numbers.
But 2023 likely isn’t just some fluke, as the report also solidifies that we’re now living in the age of solar. While still only making up 5 percent of the country’s energy mix, the authors predict that, with the industry firmly established, solar capacity could grow to 500 gigawatts by 2034 (though, they also note that those outcomes could shift due to policy changes).
Texas surpassed California in terms of total solar capacity added.
The New York Times
Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.
Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront an unexpected explosion in the number of data centers, an abrupt resurgence in manufacturing driven by new federal laws, and millions of electric vehicles being plugged in.
Many power companies were already struggling to keep the lights on, especially during extreme weather, and say the strain on grids will only increase. Peak demand in the summer is projected to grow by 38,000 megawatts nationwide in the next five years, according to an analysis by the consulting firm Grid Strategies, which is like adding another California to the grid. […]
In an ironic twist, the swelling appetite for more electricity, driven not only by electric cars but also by battery and solar factories and other aspects of the clean-energy transition, could also jeopardize the country’s plans to fight climate change.
Grist
The long-awaited jobs board for the American Climate Corps, promised early in the Biden administration, will open next month, according to details shared exclusively with Grist.
The program is modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, launched in 1933 to help the country make it through the Great Depression. The positions with the new corps could range across a number of fields including energy-efficiency installations, disaster response preparedness, recycling, and wildfire mitigation.
The White House plans to officially launch an online platform in April. At first, only a couple of hundred jobs will be posted, but eventually up to 20,000 young people are expected to be hired in the program’s first year. Interested candidates can apply to the positions through the portal, and the majority of the positions are not expected to require experience.
