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 “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 biosphere’s capacity to absorb carbon from fossil fuel. 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 humanity’s demand on nature, which is outpacing Earth’s ability to regenerate. These measurements 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 sustained by an overused resource base, a reality that puts all unprepared economies on a risky path.

So here’s the surprising part of the report. Given the stakes, you might expect 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 analyzed 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 among the ones analyzed treats resource security as a central pillar of their economic plans or strategies. While some 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.

At the heart of this failure is a self-defeating myth: that preparing for resource constraints is an environmental charity project undertaken at a nation’s expense.  The reality is the opposite, being prepares is basic self-interest, the same kind of self-interest that makes a business check and stock 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, or rather the certain disruptions, 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 underprepared to the predictable consequences.

All this is not new. It builds on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and in particular, “freedom from want.” Living within our means, ecologically speaking, isn’t a cost or a burden. It’s an investment that empowers a country with the freedom to choose its own future rather than having that future chosen for it by the next supply shock or its inability to operate in a resource constrained world. A country with secure and resilient access to the resources it needs has more room to maneuver, not less. That’s a genuinely appealing goal, and one worth getting behind.

What’s needed isn’t a miracle. It’s the same instinct that any well-run organization already has: know your exposure, plan for it, build in some resilience before the next surprise. In fact, it is not only about ignored risks, this analysis is also about countries’ missed opportunities to strengthen their economy and lay their foundation for a secure future.

The report’s headline-recommendation is practical: every country would benefit from establishing a cross-partisan task force to map their resource dependencies, understand their financial exposure, and get ahead of inevitable crunches that can be predicted. It’s nothing exotic, just the kind of due diligence any smart organization does before making a big bet on its future.

The report is candid about being a first pass, a proof of concept covering a sample of major economies, meant to be expanded rather than treated as a final verdict. But even as a first look, it is illuminating: it turns out almost nobody has opened the warehouse door. The good news is that once you know the shelves are getting bare, you can do something about it, and the countries that start now will be the ones most functional in a future with more climate disruption and resource constraints. Given how predictable this all is, it’s an opportunity sitting in plain sight, ripe for the picking.

This blog was authored by Mathis Wackernagel, Richard Crume, and Dennis West

Additional Resources:

♥   The full, downloadable report
♥   A summary for policy analysts
♥   Technical Methodology which describes the process of the evaluation and documents the prompts used
♥   A summary for the general public
♥   A blog on the AI-based research methodology behind the report 
♥   Access to a Gemini Notebook where you can query the LLM outputs for each country. This one is useful for finding out what the LLM evaluation found, without the expectations or perspectives provided by further context. This helps to test what the LLMs found on their own.
♥   Access to a Gemini Notebook where you can query all the information embedded in more context, as the output is enriched with the researchers’ previous publications and perspectives, as the LLM output is enriched with the researchers’ previous publications and perspectives. This one should be more useful for inquiries that have also an interpretation dimension, for instance who want to know more about the rationale behind the analysis.
♥   Earth Overshoot Day 2026 press release
♥   Prepared for the Predictable? press release