Every well-run organization eventually asks itself an uncomfortable question: where are our blind spots? Smart companies run the exercise regularly, pulling people from finance, operations, legal, and the front line into one room to stress-test the strategy against risks nobody wants to think about on a normal Tuesday. It’s not a fun meeting. It’s an essential one.
Global Footprint Network and Greenings‘ new report on overshoot and national strategy ends with a recommendation that is, at its heart, exactly this kind of exercise, just scaled up to the level of an entire country. And it comes with a genuinely appealing pitch: the fix here isn’t expensive, exotic, or ideologically loaded. It’s just good governance, applied to a risk that’s been sitting in the blind spot for too long.
Here’s the recommendation in a nutshell. It maintains that it would be in the self-interest of every country to build a cross-cutting task force, one that pulls in people across political lines and across government functions, specifically to inquire whether its economic strategy has a resource security blind spot. This shall not be a committee that produces a report nobody reads, but a working group with a genuinely useful checklist:
- What’s our actual resource metabolism?
- What do we depend on, from where, and how much of it?
- What financial flows are riding on those resource flows?
- how exposed are we if they’re disrupted?
- Where are the easy fixes, and where are the hard, structural ones? How good is our underlying data, honestly? And,
- maybe most usefully, where is overshoot actually working in our favor, and where is it working against us, because it’s rarely all downside?
Also focus on opportunities. That last question matters more than it might seem. This “Prepared for the Predictable?” initiative isn’t about doom, it’s an invitation for countries to upgrade their strategy. And good strategy always has two sides, risk and opportunity. A country sitting on strong biocapacity reserves, for instance, may have real opportunities that its current strategy documents simply aren’t naming out loud. A task force built to spot resource blind spots is just as capable of spotting resource advantages hiding in plain sight.
The researchers of the initiative are also specific about who else needs a seat at this table beyond government. It calls for these task forces to be backed by two other groups. First, the people who actually move capital and set the rules of the financial system: central banks, securities regulators, finance ministries, and the big international bodies like multilateral development banks that shape how money flows globally. Second, the asset owners with genuinely long time horizons and a fiduciary duty that spans generations: pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, family offices. These are exactly the institutions built to think in decades, not quarters, which makes them natural allies for a problem that unfolds over decades, not quarters.
And here’s where the story gets genuinely exciting: this logic isn’t limited to national governments. The report is explicit that the same reasoning applies just as well to cities and to companies. A city has its own resource metabolism, its own dependencies, its own blind spots in its planning documents. A company sitting on a strategy built around growth targets with no acknowledgment of resource constraints is running exactly the same risk as a country doing the same thing, just at a different scale. The task-force logic, know your exposure, map your dependencies, find your blind spots, translates cleanly across all three.
This isn’t just a suggestion sitting on paper, either. Global Footprint Network and Greenings are already testing the idea in practice. Working on the Transition Valuation Project folds overshoot risk and resource security directly into how transition strategies, infrastructure projects, and investment decisions get evaluated financially, essentially building the “blind spot check” into the actual mechanics of how money gets allocated. It’s one concrete answer to what a systemic regulator or an asset owner with generational fiduciary duty might actually do differently once they’ve spotted the blind spot: fold resource security into how they evaluate viability, the same way credit risk or currency risk already gets folded in. For example, the recent launch of the ISO 32212 standard, giving financial institutions new guidance on net-zero transition planning, points in a similar direction: the infrastructure for taking this seriously is starting to exist. It just needs more people to use it.
It’s worth being honest about where this stands today. This research report candidly acknowledges that this is an initial pass, a proof of concept built on a sample of major economies and their flagship strategy documents, not a finished, comprehensive audit of the whole world. That’s a feature, not a flaw. This is the beginning of an ongoing effort, one they plan to expand with more countries, more reports, and more granularity over time, and to extend more fully into cities and companies as the methodology matures.
That’s the genuinely optimistic note to end on. Nobody’s being asked to solve planetary overshoot single-handedly by next quarter. They’re are offered something much more practical, manageable, and familiar: pull the right people into a room, ask the uncomfortable question as you link overshoot implications to your own self-interest, and find out together where the blind spots are before the next shock finds them first. Every organization capable of running that exercise well tends to come out the other side stronger, more resilient, and better positioned for whatever’s coming. There’s no reason a country, a city, or a company can’t do exactly the same.
This blog was authored by David Lin, Mathis Wackernagel, Kristin Kostka, 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
♥ A blog on the report’s conclusions
♥ 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