Ecological debt risk: Have we already spent our resources for 2025?

Of all the material resources on Earth, the potential for biological regeneration is the most limited. For this reason, it is essential to map all of our demands against biocapacity. Adopting this biological viewpoint makes it evident which strategies are likely to succeed and which are bound to fail. Each year, the Global Footprint Network announces the day the world enters ecological debt, which is an estimate of the point in the year at which we have globally consumed more resources than the Earth can renew in one year. Calculations typically say that global ecological debt day is mid-summer. The ecological debt day of specific countries shows a slightly different assessment, which raises the question of when the global ecological debt day would occur if the world spent on average the same as that particular country. The calculation is done per capita, so countries whose per capita consumption is relatively low have no ecological debt at all. Serbia, which already entered the ecological debt in the middle of spring 2025, consumes resources faster than the world average and somewhat slower than the European Union.