National Economic Strategies and Earth Overshoot Day

The Global Footprint Network and Greenings released their Earth Overshoot Day report. In over 60 national strategy documents, they discovered that there is no quadrant in which a country both acknowledges overshoot and takes action; China's five-year plan is the closest example. No country reaches the target. The authors ask why so few governments act in their own economic self-interest and suggest that the response appears more onerous than the risk. The report doesn't address the job-creation opportunity, partly because it is aimed at raising the alarm about the misguided climate response that has many policymakers burying their heads in the sand. However, the issue is national economic self-interest, and the report omits the most obvious expression of that self-interest. In 2024 global energy infrastructure employed 76 million people, representing nearly double the rate of growth seen across the wider economy, and for the first time electricity has become the largest employer in the energy sector, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA anticipates that, under present policies, there will be 10 million more clean energy jobs by 2030 than the 3 million fossil fuel jobs lost. At the end of 2024, US clean energy sector employment was 3.6 million, 45% of which came from construction. The median earnings for wind turbine service technicians are $62,580, and the sector is expected to grow most rapidly in the United States, at a rate of 50% by 2034. According to the BLS, this growth is due to maintenance rather than installation, meaning demand for technicians follows the number of turbines already in place rather than the rate at which they are being built. GWO predicts that global demand for technicians will increase from 475,000 to 628,000 by 2030, with this demand concentrated in operations and maintenance. Once construction is completed, the turbines remain and gradually age. Another category poised for growth in a distributed, renewable energy-based grid is the traditional line worker, whose median pay is $92,560. Two-thirds of today's grid needs replacing by 2050, and that’s before anyone adds a mile of new line. Yet IEA counts 1.4 workers nearing retirement for every young entrant in grid roles. Earth needs technicians, an army of hands to build a new economy. Rebuilding an economy so it runs inside what the planet regenerates is the work of several generations. Everything we make, sell, insure, and eat rests on nature's capacity to renew itself, and the people who will do that rebuilding are the electricians, welders, technicians, and line workers retiring faster than new workers are being trained. What would it take for your country, your company, or your city to write a sustainable, circular economy into an economic development plan? #renewableenergy #planetaryboundaries #economicstrategy #industrialstrategy #climate

On 30 July 2026, humanity will have, in theoretical terms, used up everything our planet is capable of regenerating this year. For the remaining five months of the year, the global economy will be drawing on the resources of our natural world. That should give us pause for thought and prompt us to take action, shouldn’t it? #earthovershootday #planetaryboundaries #sustainability #resilience

Global Footprint Network and Greenings have just launched an analysis showing that most governments are unprepared for the predictable resource risks created by persistent ecological overshoot. Across dozens of countries, we find that none have a national strategy that meaningfully acknowledges ecological overshoot, despite mounting evidence that resource security is now a foundation of economic stability. We used AI to help produce a rigorous cross-country comparison. You can explore the results here: https://lnkd.in/g69EGJ2Z

New report with Mathis Wackernagel, David Lin from Global Footprint Network and our very own Kristin Kostka! More to follow on the link between resource security and financial stability. #TransitionValuation

“Our aim is not only to develop cutting-edge technology to reduce the barriers-to-entry and costs for any user of environmental data, but to work with a wide community to create AI software infrastructure that is publicly-owned and trustworthy." Explore the journey of how Clouds Decoded, a Scoping Our Planet opportunity seed, became Earth Compress – a £7 million project tackling a bottleneck that could unlock an entire class of currently infeasible environmental science. Read the full piece. https://lnkd.in/efXnjHjj

The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health (UNU-INWEH) has published "Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use. Carbon, Water and Land Footprints". The report analyses the impact of AI beyond carbon footprint and calls for a responsible AI ecosystem built on six principles: - Transparency - Efficiency by design - Equity & environmental justice - Lifecycle responsibility - Global cooperation - Sustainable use https://ow.ly/fmjR50Zf38y

The politics of AI is changing very quickly. As this US article highlights, data centres are becoming a new focus for environmental and community opposition, particularly around energy, water and local impacts where even New York Gov. Kathy Hochul froze most new large-scale data center construction in the state, yielding to calls to pause projects until the state can establish standards around their development. Australia is heading in the same direction. The Prime Minister’s recent AI speech made it clear that data centre operators will be expected to underwrite new power supply, pay their full grid connection costs and minimise water use. A Senate inquiry into AI and data centres is also underway. For companies operating across AI, technology, energy and data infrastructure, technical and economic arguments will no longer be enough. Securing political and community support and maintaining a social licence to operate will be critical. If your organisation is considering how to engage with these emerging policy and political challenges, I would welcome a conversation. #ArtificialIntelligence #DataCentres #GovernmentRelations #PublicPolicy #Energy #Technology #water #environment #sociallicence https://lnkd.in/etYxMk4c

Developing a model often involves working with large amounts of data. James Hill and I are integrating several datasets into our deforestation model of early modern Japan, including environmental (e.g., topographic), ecological (e.g., land cover), and social (e.g., settlement location) variables. It's a lot of work to wrangle these datasets into a usable format, but hugely rewarding when they are combined to explore questions about the nature of past human land use.

Working in Japan via the JSPS Fellowship has a number of benefits. Obvious ones like getting to visit beautiful shrine groves go without saying. Being able to access esoteric and otherwise inaccessible datasets in the West (i.e., in Japanese library basements) is another, perhaps more important factor. For the model, me and Joseph Hirst have compiled a national survey of shrine forests conducted by the Japanese Government in the 1970s. This data provides valuable information on the natural species composition of Japan, given that shrine forest groves often represent the best refuge for forest in an otherwise highly modified landscape, given their sacred status.

Our position on open-weights models Anthropic’s latest stance on open-weights models offers a pragmatic counterpoint to the current industry polarization between closed and open ecosystems. Rather than framing the debate as a binary choice, CEO Dario Amodei outlines specific technical and safety thresholds where open distribution actually enhances security through transparency. The piece is particularly valuable for its concrete discussion of how open weights allow independent researchers to audit alignment failures that proprietary systems might otherwise hide from public scrutiny. It moves beyond ideological posturing to address the practical realities of model governance and risk mitigation in a rapidly evolving landscape. This nuanced perspective is essential reading for anyone trying to navigate the complex trade-offs between innovation speed and responsible deployment. https://lnkd.in/eRxKQ7J2