Earth Overshoot Day 2025 Falls on July 24: Humanity Exceeds Nature’s Budget Again

On July 24th, 2025, Earth Overshoot Day arrived—earlier than ever before. This symbolic date, calculated annually by the Global Footprint Network, marks the point in the calendar when humanity’s demand on nature outstrips what Earth can regenerate for the entire year. From July 25th onward, we are operating in the red—living off borrowed resources and a vanishing ecological buffer.

Behind the date lies a hard truth: we are using the planet’s resources 1.8 times faster than its ecosystems can replenish. From carbon dioxide emissions to overfishing, freshwater extraction, deforestation, and soil degradation, the tally is both comprehensive and unsparing. The consequences aren’t distant or abstract—they're here in the form of climate extremes, biodiversity loss, economic shocks, and rising food and energy insecurity.

Despite the date creeping forward, Earth Overshoot Day has remained within the same late-July window for over 15 years. At first glance, that may seem like stability. But it's a dangerous illusion. The cumulative impact of overshoot—year after year of depleting natural capital—means that ecological debt is mounting, quietly compounding like interest on a loan we can’t repay.

“Stretching the limits of how much ecological damage we can get away with” is how Dr. Lewis Akenji, board member of Global Footprint Network, puts it. His stark warning is that we already owe the planet more than two decades of ecological regeneration, even if we stopped causing harm today. “If we still want to call this planet home,” he says, “this level of overshoot calls for a scale of ambition in adaptation and mitigation that should dwarf any previous historical investments we have made.”

At the heart of this crisis lies a market failure. Earth’s ecological services—like clean air, fertile soil, and stable climate—are not properly valued in global economic systems. That’s a problem for everyone, but especially for those most reliant on cheap natural inputs: industries, economies, and communities built around high resource consumption. The longer the failure persists, the more abrupt and painful the correction will be.

“It’s like overconsuming by borrowing from the future,” says Dr. Paul Shrivastava, Professor at Penn State and Co-President of the Club of Rome. “Unchecked, this will lead to default as the environment will be too depleted to offer everything people need.”

But the future isn’t written in stone. Solutions exist—and they are actionable, scalable, and in many cases, economically profitable. The Global Footprint Network has identified five key opportunity areas: Cities, Energy, Food, Population, and Planet. For example, halving fossil fuel CO2 emissions could push Earth Overshoot Day back by nearly three months. Some companies are already proving that growth doesn’t have to come at the environment’s expense; they’re expanding while actively reducing pressure on the planet.

The challenge isn’t only technological—it’s also political and behavioral. As Dr. Shrivastava notes, “We have the economic ability. Let’s now develop the political willingness—from individual consumer behavior all the way up to governments’ economic strategies.”

The message from the scientists and economists behind Earth Overshoot Day is clear: overshoot will end—either by design or by disaster. "Because of the nature of physics, overshoot cannot last,” says Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, co-founder of the Global Footprint Network. “It should not be too hard to choose which one is preferable, particularly in light of so many possible choices.”

This year’s Overshoot Day is not just a grim milestone—it’s a call to reset our priorities and rethink our models of prosperity. We still have time to #MoveTheDate. The question is: will we?