RE:WIRED GREEN 2022: How Much “Earth” Do You Take Up?

[bright upbeat music]

Good, all right.

It says I'm a science writer up there.

I'm more of our Doomsday writer.

I like to joke 'cause I write about the climate a lot,

but I'm happy to say that I'm here today to talk

about solutions for once, which is really exciting for me.

No longer Doomsday, unless you all wanna hear about that.

Probably not. We'll do solutions instead.

And I think when people hear Wired,

they think about gadgets and hacking

and like cyber punk and all those things,

and we're most certainly that, but we're also

about this larger scientific quest for knowledge

and I think how technology can actually facilitate that,

and I think that's really what this next session

is all about.

It's about how technology is not a solution

in and of itself but a tool and a toolkit

for fixing these larger global problems,

and things like climate change

and the biodiversity crisis and any number

of other global crises are very big and scary and daunting,

but that's actually exactly

what the fossil fuel industry wants us to think.

It wants us to feel paralyzed like we can't do anything,

and that delays action.

It lets them keep making money on fossil fuels.

We can't let that happen.

So there's actually really interesting ways

in which seemingly small solutions,

even on the individual level,

can add up into something much bigger and more impactful,

and to that end, I wanna bring out our first speakers.

They're with the Global Footprint Network,

an international sustainability think tank

that helped develop the concept of the ecological footprint.

This is measuring what nature can provide

versus what humanity demands of nature,

a very important metric.

So we've got David Lin, first of all.

He leads the Global Footprint Network's research team,

and Mathis Wackernagel, its president.

Please welcome them to this stage.

[audience applauds]

He comes out first, and [muffled speaking].

[bright upbeat music]

Thank you.

[audience applauds]

[device clicks]

So how many of you have heard

of this thingy called climate change?

[audience laughs]

Yeah, I just wanted to test whether your arms still work

because we have a lot of voting going on today,

and most of you probably have heard

of climate change because of Al Gore's movie,

Inconvenient Truth.

It's hard not to know about it.

But when you hear Inconvenient Truth,

it sounds a bit like, the more I know, the worse I'm off.

The more I know, I have to live a miserable life.

So David, what do you think?

Is this really an inconvenient truth?

Not this. That's a really easy one.

The more you know about what the future brings,

the better decisions you can make, right?

And what that means

is that the more we understand climate change

and how it relates to resources and regeneration,

the more of an advantage we're gonna be at.

So are you guys ready for a ride?

Yeah! Woo! Okay, let's ride.

It's pretty simple.

The future has never been more predictable.

We know that people want to eat, sleep,

have fun, move about, and also what we know

is that the future will be one of far more climate change

and far less resources in any imaginable scenario.

So given that, not to prepare yourself

for that future is just economically absurd.

There's no benefit waiting for others.

Climate change and resource constraints,

that's just the context in which we live.

And in this new context,

the rules of the game have changed.

What does that mean?

Persistent overshoot is going

to significantly change the course of human's Future.

Overshoot means that humanity's demand for nature,

which includes food, fiber, timber, CO2 sequestration,

is now greater than what the earth can regenerate.

But by how much?

And exactly that's what we can measure.

Overshoot or the overuse of nature,

we measure using about 15,000 data points per country

and year to see exactly how much we use

and how much Earth can regenerate.

So we start from that. How much do we have?

How much ecologically productive area

is there on the planet?

We divide that by number of people,

and we get to about 3.8 acres to produce all we need,

timber, food, CO2 sequestration, accommodate our houses.

And then we do the other side of the equation.

How much do we actually use for exactly these things?

Your oranges and potatoes and everything you consume,

the CO2 you emit, et cetera, and it adds up to about 6.6.

That's more than the 3.8, about 75% more.

And you ask, How is it possible that you can use more

than what is being regenerated?

It's like with money.

Some of us can spend more money than they earn,

but you can't do that forever.

So essentially, what you're saying

is that humanity uses the regeneration equivalent

of 1.75 earths.

So that extra 0.75, that means we've got forestry

and fishery stocks being drawn down.

We've got CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere.

We've got global biodiversity loss and topsoil loss.

We can also think of it as a budget, an annual budget.

From January 1st to July 28th,

humanity has consumed the resources equivalent

to what the earth can regenerate in an entire year,

and that's why we called July 28th Earth Overshoot Day,

and for the remaining 156 days in the year,

we're actually living off depletion.

Now let's break that down to a country level.

Here, see a map.

On this map, there are countries like farms

because they actually are farms.

The red ones are the ones where the residents consume more

than the ecosystems in that country can renew.

The green ones, they have more available

than what their residents consume.

So I would like to take you in a little ride and say,

Which country would you like to go to?

Shall we go and visit UK? Brazil!

Yeah, you want Brazil.

We have three three we suggest

so that we can vote more easily.

So UK, India, or Ecuador?

So Ecuador?

Ecuador! Ecuador.

Let's go to Ecuador. Ecuador.

And you can go to these yourself later on.

We'll give you the URL.

Like Ecuador is here on the equator

as you may suggest or think.

So this is how the time trend looks like

over the last 60 years.

Now they consume a little bit less that world average.

That's the red line.

But back in 1960, they had about five times more capacity

than what they consume in the country.

And since then, like the reserve has now just

as a tiny fraction of a few percent points,

percentage points, the down in biocapacity

is largely because there are now more Ecuadorians,

and also, consumption has gone up just so slightly.

So they're a bit in a tight spot.

So it looks like Ecuador's nearing

being a biocapacity deficit,

but there's a lot of red on the map.

So let's go back. Is it necessarily

a bad thing if there's all this red on the map?

I'm looking around the room, and I'm betting there's people

out there who grow their own vegetables,

probably have some fruit trees.

Maybe you have even have some chickens

and they provide some food for you.

But I'm betting almost nobody produces enough food

to actually be self reliant or timber

or other resources for that matter.

In fact, in modern day,

almost every household is actually in a deficit.

But how do we make up that deficit?

It's pretty simple, right?

We have jobs, we make money,

and we can exchange that for goods and services and food.

You can also apply the same concept to national populations.

We did this in a study we published last year

in the journal Nature Sustainability,

and what we found is that 72% of the world population lives

in a country that both runs at biocapacity deficit,

so they produce less resources than they consume,

and they have less than world average income.

What does that mean?

They're gonna have a harder time

as resources become limited to purchase

and compete for resources on the global market.

So you may think, I'm not part of the 72%.

Why should I care? But actually, it's so pervasive.

72%, it's such a big part. It's a growing trend.

You cannot escape that reality, and to look into that,

let's take a look into the future.

Let's go to 2100.

Here, a scenario model that we produced is very simple.

It shows from 1960 to today, 2020,

about the actual data points and then calculates

for the future based on assumptions that we made.

Here, the assumptions are same reproduction rate,

same consumption as today.

What does that do?

Now, note that it's not just overshoot itself,

how much more you use.

It's the persistence of overshoot,

the accumulation of the deficit over time

that adds up to a debt.

And if you look at the debt today, up till today,

that that accumulated corresponds to about 20 years

of ecological production of the entire planet

without taking anything, and that assumes it's reversible,

and therefore, the result is climate change,

the CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere,

topsoil losses, et cetera.

So when we look at this graph and extrapolate to 2100,

you see this number 101, this would be the debt,

100 years of ecological production that we would be in debt,

five times more than today.

And the question is, David,

do you think that's even physically possible?

I asked it before, actually, the first time.

Mathis, I know a place with beautiful green fields,

rainforests that go on forever.

If you have some Bitcoin, we can buy a place there.

It's called Metaverse.

[audience laughs]

All right, So that's virtual reality.

I know, I know. How about reality reality?

In reality, Can't we just keep borrowing

and keep racking up our debt?

The federal government does that.

We're the best country in the world, aren't we?

Totally. If we keep borrowing,

we can probably even build some spaceships and occupy Mars.

Great idea. [laughs]

All right, so maybe let's stay here on Earth.

Let's go to the model here

and let's decide a future together here on Earth.

We know that for about the past 50 years,

our per person consumption has remained relatively steady.

With a show of hands,

do we think that's gonna stay the same?

Do we think it's gonna go up,

or do we think it's gonna go down up?

I don't see that many hands yet.

I see up hands. Wow.

Just so you know, if you don't vote,

you have no right to complain about the fate of humanity.

[audience laughs]

All right, so we've gone up. How about population?

That's not that much up. That's-

Population's fairly stable.

But we know right now that there's about 2.3 children born

per woman as a world average.

Will it stay the same, or do we think it'll go down to 1.4?

1.4 is about what we see in Portugal, Germany, Italy.

We've got down. All right, so let's have a quick look.

It looks like we're at about 1.6 Earths

and about 87 Earth years of ecological debt in 2100.

All right, let's add one more variable.

What about our planet's regeneration?

We know that, for the past 60 years,

regeneration has been increasing by about 0.4% per year.

A lot of this is due to agricultural intensification,

and that's resulted in some negative things as well,

topsoil loss, some other things.

With that in mind, with the ecological debt in mind,

do we think we're gonna stay the same,

go up, or are we gonna crash?

I see hands going down more,

so it's actually I think less.

So this would be- Less.

If we keep it the same, at least. Oh, less, okay.

All right, so I've gone down about 12% here,

and it's now 2100.

We consume about 1.8 Earths,

and we've racked up about 118 Earth years of debt.

That's about six times more than today,

and that's 2100 for you.

Yay! Let's come back to 2022.

Maybe we can change that path. Who knows?

So what does that all mean for the entrepreneur in you?

What does that mean? It's pretty straightforward.

Which businesses will be valuable in the future

of climate change and resource constraints?

It's businesses who, when they expand, reduce overshoot.

Why? Because they don't run into physical constraints.

For example, let's take a car company.

We expand a car company, more cars being built,

overshoot goes up.

Let's look at the windmill company.

Takes energy to produce windmills,

but then if they're built and they displace coal power,

then overshoot goes down.

So the more you build the windmill factory,

the more overshoot goes down.

Let me become even more specific.

In the world on average, to produce $1 value add,

it takes about 28 square feet,

not that much, of ecological productive space

to produce that on average worldwide.

We work with the German recycling company that, actually,

as they increase $1 value to the economy,

reduce overshoot by 310 square feet,

10 times more in the right direction.

So the more they exist, the better the world.

The more such businesses,

the further down ecological overshoot.

These will be the winners of the future.

So David, These aren't-

do you think this is just an exception

or is that actually- Absolutely not.

They are not an exception. All viable.

In fact, there are plenty of solutions that exist.

They're viable and they exist today.

If you go to our website

at www.overshootday.org/power-of-possibility,

we've compiled the list of 100 of them.

These aren't just 100 businesses.

These are entire sectors

and categories that reduce overshoot, and for each one,

we've calculated how much they reduce overshoot

and move the date.

I'm sure you'll be hearing about more solutions

throughout this conference.

We organize them in five arenas, like our hand.

The thumb represents how healthy is the planet.

We can strengthen it. We can strengthen biocapacity.

The demand, the other four figures, it's the cities,

how we construct them, how we manage them,

very influential, how we live, how we power them.

Do we power them with solar power or coal?

How we feed ourselves.

About 55% of the biocapacity of the planet

is used now just to feed ourselves, and how many we are.

If you're double as many,

then there's only half as much per person.

So if they say the future's in your hand,

that's the hand they mean.

So what we hope we did with you is take a little trip,

a fun trip to 2100,

see whether we may want to explore another 2100 with you,

and also show you, can you go to the next one?

Give you more tools.

If you go to this website, Wired,

footprintnetwork.org/wired,

there are all these tools available

from the comfort of your home.

You can play around with it. One is particularly nifty.

It's a footprint calculator for yourself.

You can find out how many Earths

would it take if everybody is like you.

So you can play around there.

I don't know if you have a little time just

to click through it.

This is how it looks like.

It looks more cool in reality. Okay, here.

So you can go here,

and you can choose a different lifestyles,

et cetera, and have fun.

So I think the main thing is it's a big trip to 2100.

You can have fun.

There are lots of tools, and literally,

the future is in your hands.

Thank you so much.

[audience applauds]