3 ms·
I'm struggling to understand how the overall Overshoot Day could be August 2 when looking at the by-country breakdown, I don't see any really significantly popu
by sokoloff 3y ago
I'm struggling to understand how the overall Overshoot Day could be August 2 when looking at the by-country breakdown, I don't see any really significantly populous countries having a Country Overshoot Day past August 2.
It seems to me that the population-weighted average of the country dates should be the global date, right?
Edit: Found it. I looked for the underlying data and several populous countries have a Country Overshoot Day of "none", meaning they could drag the overall average quite a bit later but are not shown in the infographic.
- penteract 3y agoAs a separate point from the countries not shown, you can't just average the dates - if I'm using half an earth's worth of resources every day, and you're using half an earth's worth of resources every year, between us we use an earth's worth of resources much more often than once every 6 months. You need to take reciprocals to get consumption rates, then average, then convert back into a date. This results in an earlier date than just doing the weighted average of dates.
- sokoloff 3y agoQuite right. Thank you for pointing it out.
- MisterKent 3y agoNot in this case, since each country is calculated based approximately off its area. So, fractionally they do add up to one earth.
- penteract 3y agoBased on > 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. and https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/ https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days... which specifies they use global biocapacity, I don't think a country's area is used in their calculations.