HSBC warns that Earth is running out of resources to sustain life

A
paramilitary police officer wearing a mask stands guard in front
of a portrait of the late Chairman Mao Zedong during smog at
Tiananmen Square after a red alert was issued for heavy air
pollution in Beijing, China, December 20, 2016
REUTERS/Jason Lee

• The planet is running out of resources, HSBC warned in
  a new note.
• 
  Earth Overshoot Day — the point in a year at
  which our demand for natural resources exceeds what the planet
  can renew — occurred on August 1, just seven months
  into 2018.
• HSBC said companies and governments are not “adequately
  prepared” for climate impacts. 

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One of the world’s largest banks says the planet is running out
of resources and warns that neither governments nor companies are
prepared for climate change.

The world spent its entire natural resource budget for the year
by August 1, a group of analysts at HSBC said in a note that
cited research from the Global Footprint Network
(GFN).

That means that the world’s citizens used up all of the planet’s
resources for the year in just seven months, according to GFN’s
analysis.

“In our opinion, these findings and events show that many
businesses and governments are not adequately prepared for
climate impacts, nor are they using natural resources
efficiently,” the HSBC analysts said in the note. 

Many banks and asset managers have started factoring climate
risks into their decision-making process — a move
spurred in part by former New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg. But it’s far less common to see multinational banks
sound the alarm about climate change so explicitly in their
equity research. 

To calculate Earth’s natural resource budget, GFN considers the
demand for natural resources — which includes food, forests, and
marine products — as well as humans’ impact on the environment
from factors like carbon emissions. The combined total is
designed give a comprehensive picture of humanity’s global
footprint. 

Earth Overshoot Day, the point in a year at which we use up a
year’s worth of resources, has been steadily moving forward in
time since GFN first started tracking it. In 1970, we “overshot”
Earth’s resource budget by only 2 days — Overshoot Day fell on
December 29, according to HSBC. That date has been pushed up by
almost five months since then.

HSBC’s note also warned about extreme events resulting from heat,
including the wildfires
in Scandinavia and
broken temperature records around the world. 

“As scientists work on attribution analysis for specific
events
–
the general consensus is that
climate change is making these events more likely to occur and
more severe,” HSBC said.

The predicted impacts of climate change are starting to become
very real. Wildfires
have
torn through California in recent years, and they’re part of
a
worsening trend related to rising global temperatures. Other
consequences include increased
frequency of hurricanes and
flooding, melting
ice sheets, and greater numbers of heat
waves. 

Recent studies have shown that global temperatures by the
year 2100 could be
up to 15% higher than the highest projections from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

According to HSBC, extreme events have severe economic and
social costs.

“In our view, adaptation will move further up the
agenda with a growing focus on the social consequences,” the
analysts said.