Humanity uses 1.7 Earths, 20 months of regrowth every year

We would need about 1.7 Earths to keep up with everything humanity takes from nature in a year and to absorb its carbon dioxide. The latest complete accounts put the figure at 1.71 for 2023, and on the trend of the past decade it stands near 1.72 today¹. Put another way, the planet needs about 20 months to regrow what people use in twelve.

The difference is made up by running down what the planet has stored and letting waste pile up: fish stocks fished down, forests cleared, carbon dioxide building up in the air⁷¹⁰.

The number comes from the National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, compiled by researchers at York University in Canada and published by Global Footprint Network, a research group¹. Each new edition rewrites the whole series. The 2025 edition said humanity used 1.8 Earths. The 2026 edition lowered the whole series, mainly because of a higher estimate of how much carbon the oceans absorb, so 2025 now stands at about 1.7 without anything in the world having improved⁴²⁶.

How the planet is measured in global hectares

The accounts add up people’s demands on nature in a single unit, the global hectare: a hectare of land or sea with the world’s average biological productivity¹. Cropland, grazing land, forest for timber and paper, fishing grounds, land under buildings and roads, and the forest it would take to absorb the carbon dioxide from burning fuel are all converted into it.

The Earth’s surface covers about 51 billion hectares, but only 12.2 billion of them hold most of its biological productivity, so one global hectare is about a 12.2-billionth of what the planet regenerates in a year⁹. In 2023 humanity’s demand came to 20.75 billion global hectares, and the planet regenerated 12.14 billion, a capacity the accounts call biocapacity. Divide one by the other and you get 1.71 Earths¹.

The measure counts only what nature regrows. It doesn’t track how much oil, gas, coal or metal is left in the ground, and heavy metals, radioactive waste and persistent chemicals never enter it. Of all the greenhouse gases it counts only carbon dioxide from burning fuel, and soil loss and deforestation show up only once they lower the land’s productivity⁹.

Adding methane alone would put about a quarter of an Earth on top, which is why Global Footprint Network calls its own result “a conservative floor rather than a worst case”⁹.

Humanity has needed more than one Earth since the early 1970s

Humanity first demanded more than the planet could regenerate in the early 1970s. In the accounts the ratio was 0.96 Earths in 1970 and went above one for the first time in 1973, at 1.04¹. Global Footprint Network dates the start of overshoot to the last day of 1972⁵.

In 1961 humanity used about 0.69 Earths. Since then the planet’s biocapacity has grown by a quarter, from 9.73 to 12.14 billion global hectares; by our calculation from the accounts, most of the gain is cropland, which nearly tripled its biocapacity on a fifth more land as yields rose. Humanity’s footprint tripled over the same years, from 6.73 to 20.75 billion¹.

The steep climb ended around 2010. The ratio was 1.61 that year and has stayed between about 1.6 and 1.7 since, dipping to 1.59 in the pandemic year of 2020 and reaching 1.71 in 2022 and 2023¹. Part of the reason, covered below, is that some of the largest footprints per person have been shrinking. The total hasn’t started to fall, though: Global Footprint Network’s estimate for 2026, 1.73 Earths, is the highest it has recorded³.

Earth Overshoot Day falls on 30 July in 2026

Earth Overshoot Day is the date by which humanity has used everything the planet will regenerate that year. Global Footprint Network finds it by dividing the planet’s biocapacity by humanity’s footprint and multiplying by the 365 days of the year⁵. It is the Earths figure turned into a date: a year divided by 1.73 Earths is 211 days, and the 211th day of 2026 is 30 July³.

The date is a nowcast, an estimate for the current year carried forward from accounts that end in 2023, and its authors stress that “nowcasting is distinct from forecasting”⁶. Every past date is recalculated with each edition, so dates announced in different years can’t be compared. The 2025 date was announced as 24 July and now sits on 1 August, mainly because of the revised ocean carbon figures, with a few smaller data adjustments⁵³.

By Global Footprint Network’s count, the overshoot accumulated since the 1970s now equals 20.6 years of everything the planet produces, and the debt grows by about three quarters of a year’s production every year. It is unlikely that all of it can be paid back³. Some of the forms overshoot takes, such as lost species and degraded soil, can’t simply be regrown¹⁰.

Carbon is 60% of humanity’s footprint

The largest single demand humanity makes on the planet is carbon dioxide. Absorbing the CO2 from coal, oil and gas that the oceans don’t take up would need 12.51 billion global hectares of forest, more on its own than everything the planet regenerates in a year¹.

The calculation depends on how fast forests take up carbon. In the method’s 2018 description, the accounts assume an average forest absorbs 0.73 tonnes of carbon a hectare each year, so the slower the forests, the larger the carbon footprint¹⁰. Carbon’s share has grown with fossil fuel use, from 42% of the footprint in 1961 to 60% in 2023¹.

Everything else humanity takes adds up to 0.68 Earths: cropland 0.30, forest products 0.17, grazing 0.09, built-up land 0.07 and fishing 0.06¹. Without the carbon, humanity would still be living within one planet; burning fossil fuels is what tips the total over.

Is the ecological footprint accurate?

The total is only as accurate as its carbon figure, because all of the overshoot sits there. Everything else humanity uses comes to 0.68 Earths, inside one planet, while the carbon part rests on an assumed rate at which forests absorb CO2, and changing that rate changes the answer¹¹¹.

That is the critics’ main target. In 2013 Linus Blomqvist and colleagues, three of them at the Breakthrough Institute, a US research group, argued in the journal PLOS Biology that the global overshoot “consists entirely of an unreliable reframing of human carbon emissions”¹¹. No other land type shows a real global deficit, they wrote, because the accounts for cropland, grazing and built-up land are built so that they always come out close to balance. The current accounts show exactly that for cropland and built-up land, where footprint and biocapacity are identical: 3.59 and 0.82 billion global hectares in 2023¹.

In Blomqvist’s thought experiment, raising the forest uptake rate to 2.6 tonnes of carbon a hectare, about three and a half times the rate the accounts use, makes humanity’s entire overshoot disappear¹¹. The ocean revision that took the 2025 figure from 1.8 to about 1.7 shows how much rides on such assumptions.

William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, who developed the footprint, replied in the same journal. The planet can’t show a cropland deficit, they wrote, because the Earth has nowhere to import cropland from¹².

Global totals also hide local damage, as Global Footprint Network’s own guide to the method’s limits acknowledges⁹. The world’s fishing footprint uses about two thirds of what the oceans regenerate, 0.69 of 1.06 billion global hectares¹, yet the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) counts 37.6% of assessed fish stocks as overfished¹³. Blomqvist and colleagues pointed to the same mismatch as a sign the measure misses what matters¹¹.

The footprint’s authors read the gap the other way, as a sign the real deficit is bigger than the accounts show, and say they would deduct overfishing and soil loss if consistent global data existed¹². The guide concludes the accounts are “likely to understate rather than overstate” overshoot⁹. Whatever the right uptake rate, the carbon dioxide building up in the air shows that land and sea are not absorbing all of it.

If everyone lived like Americans, we would need 4.8 Earths

If everyone on Earth consumed like the average American, humanity would need about 4.8 Earths. If everyone lived like the average person in China, it would need about 2.4, and like the average Indian 0.77, within what the planet regenerates¹. These are our calculations from the 2026 accounts: each country’s consumption footprint per person, which counts imports and leaves out exports, divided by the 1.50 global hectares per person the planet regenerated in 2023.

Grouped by income, the gap is wider still. By our calculation, combining the accounts with the World Bank’s income groups, the average person in a high-income country uses 5.26 global hectares, three and a half Earths’ worth, and the average person in a low-income country 0.89, about 0.6 of an Earth¹¹⁴. Between the two sits the world’s fast-growing consumer class.

Global Footprint Network publishes its own country figures as Country Overshoot Days. Its 2026 calendar gives the United States 5.1 Earths and an overshoot day of 14 March, and Qatar 10 Earths and 4 February, but those rest on the previous edition of the accounts, mostly 2024 data⁸. On the current edition several countries come out lower, Canada and Qatar by about a fifth, so the two sets shouldn’t be mixed. Australia has no consumption figure in the 2026 edition and is left out of the table¹.

A few countries hold the world’s spare biocapacity

Most people live in countries that demand more than their own land and seas regenerate. By our calculation on the 2026 accounts, 95 of the 126 countries with consumption figures ran a deficit in 2023, and they are home to 86.5% of the people those countries cover¹.

The spare capacity sits in a handful of creditor countries, the ones with capacity to spare, most of them with large forests and relatively few people. Brazil alone holds 48% of all national biocapacity reserves, and with Russia, Canada, Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo it holds 79%. China’s deficit by itself, 4.04 billion global hectares, is bigger than every creditor country’s reserves put together, 2.54 billion¹. Those totals leave out a few large creditors with no consumption account, Australia among them.

That suggests trade can move a shortfall around but not close it. No amount of spare capacity elsewhere covers China’s deficit alone, and the world’s overshoot is met the way it always is, from run-down stocks and carbon left in the air.

The UK, US and Germany have cut their footprints by a third

The footprint per person has fallen a long way in some of the richest countries, even counting everything they import. The UK’s went from 6.09 global hectares in 2007 to 3.65 in 2023, the United States’ from 10.63 in 2000 to 7.14, and Germany’s from 5.54 in 2010 to 4.03¹. The latest year is often revised, but the falls hold to 2022 as well.

Carbon is a large part of it, at least in the UK: by our calculation from the accounts, its carbon footprint per person more than halved between 1970 and 2023, from 4.45 global hectares to 2.16¹. The UK government’s own count of the greenhouse gases behind what Britons consume points the same way: 29% below its 2007 peak by 2023, even as the share emitted abroad to make imports rose to more than half¹⁵.

None of these countries is close to living within one Earth. The UK still needs 2.43 and the United States 4.76. And the world total hasn’t fallen, which suggests demand elsewhere has grown about as fast as these countries cut theirs.

Where the number of Earths could be heading

If the trend of the ten years to 2023 simply carried on, humanity would use about 1.74 Earths by 2030. That is our own extension of the accounts, not a forecast; nobody publishes one, and the number has barely moved in a decade¹. Replacing coal, oil and gas would shrink the carbon part, the 60% that tips the total past one Earth, while more people joining the consumer class and using more energy would push the total up.

Take the carbon away entirely and the 0.68 Earths left would fit inside one planet. Whether that is far enough below one is another question: if half the planet were left to wild species, as the biologist E.O. Wilson proposed, humanity’s demand would have to stay well below one planet, Global Footprint Network notes⁹.

Earth scientists track the same pressure another way, through nine planetary boundaries, each a limit on one of the systems that keep the planet stable. Seven of the nine are now crossed, all at their worst recorded levels. Only aerosols in the air and the ozone layer, now recovering, are inside their limits¹⁷¹⁸. Scientists have proposed measuring the boundary for living things by the share of the world’s plant growth that humanity takes for itself, which has a page of its own¹⁶.

How much of humanity’s demand comes from the number of people, and how much from how each of them lives, is the question on the world population page.