The minister for sustainable development, environment and climate change, Leo Brincat, today commemorated Earth Overshoot Day, which aims to highlight the pressures on resources countries face yearly.

Today, 86 per cent of the world’s population live in countries that use more resources than what is renewably available within their own borders. These countries rely for their needs on resource surpluses concentrated in ecological creditor countries and this is the reason why the ecological creditor countries concept is coming about since a number of countries are having to ditch their resources and turning to resources of other countries.

By comparison, in 1961, the vast majority of countries around the globe had ecological surpluses. Those numbers have slowly dwindled. Meanwhile, the pressure on the remaining biocapacity reserves continues to grow.

The minister said that it is our duty to address this challenge.