Wednesday is German Earth Overshoot Day. This means that on May 5, Germany has already consumed as many resources as our country has available for the whole year. "After just four months, Germany is already living on credit. The early German Earth Overshoot Day is an alarm signal and an indictment of the failed environmental and nature conservation policy of recent years," says Olaf Bandt, Chairman of the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND). "The German government must act urgently and set much more ambitious climate targets and instruments following the landmark ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court. At the same time, it must initiate the overdue resource turnaround in order to reduce Germany's resource consumption permanently and in absolute terms."
In contrast to the global Earth Overshoot Day in midsummer, the German Earth Overshoot Day is already in spring. The reasons for this include energy consumption that continues to be far too high, rising CO2 emissions from transportation and factory farming, as well as soil, air and groundwater pollution.
"If everyone in the world lived as wastefully as we do, humanity would need three Earths to cover its consumption of resources. As of today, Germany is living on credit and wasting the livelihoods of all countries and future generations. This is deeply unjust and comes at the expense of people in the Global South," criticizes Bandt.
Summer droughts and heavy rainfall, the state of our forests, insect mortality and the loss of biodiversity: the consequences of the irresponsible treatment of our planet are unmistakable in this country too and will worsen in the coming years if no countermeasures are taken. Constantin Kuhn from the BUNDjugend board emphasizes: "The Federal Constitutional Court has just made it clear that burdens should be distributed fairly between the present and the future. To ensure that my and future generations still have a future worth living on this planet, we must not now focus exclusively onCO2 budgets. In order to protect people's lives and health, the state must initiate a comprehensive resource turnaround and close the gap between rich and poor."
BUND is calling for a clear legal framework to achieve social and ecological change. Bandt: "The days of economic growth at any price are over. Our growth-oriented economic system is not only having a catastrophic ecological impact globally and here in Germany, but is also leading to increasingly serious social disruptions. Everything we are doing now is an investment in the freedom of this and future generations."
