Imagine a business that tracks its revenue obsessively, down to the penny, every quarter, every earnings call, every headline. But it never checks its warehouse. It has no idea how much inventory is left, how fast it’s being used, or whether the shelves will be bare next year. It just keeps cheerfully selling off a stockroom nobody has checked in decades.
Neither you nor I would invest in that company. And yet, according to the upcoming report “Prepared for the Predictable? Overshoot and the Failure of Countries to Ready Themselves,” issued by Global Footprint Network and Greenings, this illustrates how most national governments run their economies.
The stockroom, in this case, is the planet. And the inventory is everything physical that makes an economy work: water, cropland, timber, minerals, the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon. Economists have a word for tracking revenue: GDP. But they don’t have an equivalent for tracking the warehouse—that’s the blind spot the report is about, and it’s a big one, because nothing in an economy happens without it. Every phone, every meal, every building starts as something extracted from nature. Even knowledge only becomes functional once it’s matched with physical resources from the Earth.
And here’s the twist: the warehouse is genuinely running low. Global Footprint Network has spent decades measuring such ecological overshoot (humanity’s total demand on nature outpacing what nature can regenerate). It is these measurements that also determine Earth Overshoot Day, the date each year when humanity has used up Earth’s annual budget of renewable resources and starts borrowing from the future. The world crossed into overshoot back in the early 1970s, and every year since, we’ve been drawing down the stockroom a little more.
This isn’t an abstract “someday” problem either. The report points to two real shocks in just the past four years: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which hammered global agricultural exports and energy supply chains, and this year’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which wiped out a fifth of global oil shipping in a single stroke. Both events rattled economies far beyond their immediate region, a reminder that when your resources come from far away, someone else’s bad week can become your recession. And oh, and do you remember the COVID lock-down?
But the problem is not the shocks themselves. They are symptoms. They merely show that we live in an overstretched system depending on ever more eroded resources. This puts all unprepared economies on a risky path.
So here’s the surprising part of this upcoming report. You might expect, given all this, that countries would be scrambling to build resource security into their core economic strategies, just like they incorporate inflation targets or debt ceilings. But when Global Footprint Network and Greenings checked the official strategy documents of dozens of major global economies, such as five-year plans, national security strategies, budget speeches, and industrial roadmaps, we found something different: not a single country on Planet Earth treats resource security as a central pillar of their economic plans or strategies. While a number of countries do consider the ongoing availability of some key natural resources important to their industrial base and military preparedness, lasting resources security is never at the forefront and sometime no more than a footnote of their strategies.
Yet, there is a self-defeating misperception. Preparing for resource constraints isn’t a favor to the planet, done at the country’s own expense. It’s basic self-interest, the same kind of self-interest that makes a business check its warehouse. Countries that build resilience now by reducing their resource dependence, while also, investing in renewable capacity, and protecting the ecosystems that underpin food and water security are simply better positioned to weather the growing constraints and related shocks that are becoming the new normal. Countries that don’t are exposing themselves to the uncertainties of the future.
There’s a version of this argument that sounds gloomy, another “inconvenient truth.” But that’s not the point of the report. Rather, it presents insights that are inconvenient not to have. You might say it is about “inconvenient ignorance.” Overshoot is not the prime challenge; rather it is the threat not to respond to overshoot and remaining unprepared to the predictable consequences.
Therefore, this upcoming report, using countries’ published strategies as the source, examines whether those national economic strategies account for resource security and ecological overshoot. It argues that such resource security is essential since economies depend on finite physical inputs, yet their GDP focus ignores these constraints, leading to persistent global overshoot since the 1970s. Using a structured rubric and AI-assisted evaluation of key policy documents, the report finds no country fully integrates resource limits into strategy. While some nations show partial awareness, most lack binding responses. The upcoming report highlights systemic fragility, policy gaps, and the need for governments to map dependencies and build resilience against predictable resource constraints.
CHECK OUT THE FULL REPORT AND ITS TOOLS HERE STARTING JULY 26, 2026.
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