The 12th Venice International Architecture Exhibition is opening (preview on August 26, 27 and 28, 2010) and Earth Overshoot Day is past (August 21st). It would be interesting to ask every architect we’ll meet among the pavilions: “What is the footprint of your buildings?”. And to us: “What are we doing about our personal footprint?”.
txt: August 21 is Earth Overshoot Day – www.footprintnetwork.org
August 21st marks an unfortunate milestone: the day in which we exhaust our ecological budget for the year. Once we pass this day, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year. From that point until the end of the year, we meet our ecological demand by liquidating resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
What is Earth Overshoot Day?
Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates nature’s supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet generates, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions. Earth Overshoot Day, a concept devised by U.K.-based new economics foundation, marks the day when demand on ecological services begins to exceed the renewable supply.
