How Colcom Foundation Connects Population and Ecological Overshoot
The concept of ecological overshoot rarely makes the front page, but Colcom Foundation has built much of its environmental advocacy around this single measure. The foundation argues that understanding biocapacity, and how far the U.S. has exceeded it, is essential to grasping the full scale of the country’s environmental predicament.
What Biocapacity Reveals
Ecological footprint measures how much biologically productive land and water a population requires to generate the resources it uses and absorb the waste it produces. Biocapacity overshoot occurs when that demand exceeds what the local environment can supply. An ecological deficit means a nation is either importing biocapacity from other regions, depleting its own natural assets, or pushing carbon waste into the atmosphere.
By this measure, the United States has been in severe overshoot since 1970. That year, the country was consuming 227 percent of its available biocapacity. Decades of environmental effort, cleaner technology, and changed consumer behavior reduced per capita biocapacity use by more than 20 percent. Yet by 2020, total consumption had risen to approximately 240 percent. Colcom Foundation attributes the entire net increase to population growth.
Sharing the Planet With Other Species
The overshoot numbers become sharper still when human needs are weighed against those of other species. The widely discussed 30×30 initiative calls for protecting 30 percent of U.S. land for wildlife. Under that framework, U.S. biocapacity utilization in 2020 reaches approximately 341 percent. The Half-Earth proposal, which would reserve 50 percent of the planet for nature to protect roughly 80 percent of Earth’s species, places U.S. consumption at 478 percent of sustainable levels.
North American bird populations have fallen from ten billion to seven billion since 1970. Land paved or developed in the U.S. by 2020 covered an area the size of Montana, West Virginia, and South Carolina combined. Just 13 percent of U.S. land carries any conservation protection.
Colcom Foundation argues these numbers demand a response that goes beyond per capita efficiency improvements. Population stabilization, the foundation maintains, is the variable that determines whether the other interventions can hold. Visit this page for related information.
Learn more about Colcom Foundation on https://waterlandlife.org/land-conservation/colcom-revolving-fund-for-local-land-trusts/