Latest figures reveal Britain’s rising global interdependence as the nation goes into ecological debt on 15 AprilResearch from nef (the new economics foundation) reveals that on Sunday 15 April this year, the UK in effect stops relying on its own natural resources to support itself and starts to ‘live off’ the rest of the world.
At current UK levels of consumption our ‘ecological debt day’ – the day we begin living beyond our environmental means – falls only a third of the way through the year and has crept ever earlier over the last four decades. These latest findings build on a report, released by nef last year which exposed, for the first time, the sharp rise in how the UK depends on the rest of world, and how the burden of the Britain’s high-consuming lifestyle is exported internationally.
