Chile is the first country in Latin America to reach the ecological overdraft of 2024

Chili It was again in 2024 and for the fifth consecutive year the first country of Latin America in reaching the calling “ecological overdraft”that is, in just five months it has already consumed all the resources and services of nature that it can regenerate in a year.

This means that from that day on it consumes the natural reserves (mainly water) of the future and does not allow nature to produce more and regenerate.

“It is not very encouraging news. Although the overdraft for our country in 2024 was delayed a few days compared to last year, the situation that we are experiencing as a nation is still very worrying, since this means that 2.5 planets would be needed to live in the world if we all did it. like the average Chilean”The water crisis specialist at Greenpeace Chile and geographer at the University of Chile, Silvana Espinosa, told EFE.

According to data from the Earth Overshoot Day platform, May 23 was the symbolic deadline by which Chile consumed all the resources and services of nature that it can regenerate in one year, while in 2023 it was May 15, that is , eight days before.

“That is extremely risky, because this focuses on the month of May, which is month five of twelve months. So we are at the bottom, using up all our reserves for the future. Within the first five months of the year. “And we are not giving it the capacity or enough time for nature to regenerate,” Espinosa warned.

For the activist, the water crisis that the country has been suffering for more than ten years, and air pollution, are the two most critical sources of the climate crisis in the Latin American country.

Even so, he also indicated that the delay in the date of Chile’s ecological debt “It is probably due to some measures that were taken at the government level and the rains last year,” although “Just one week is nothing compared to the five consecutive years of being the first country in Latin America to reach ecological overdraft.”

According to a study by Álvaro Salazar, a researcher at the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB) of Chile and the University of La Serena, rainfall in the country is expected to decrease between twenty and 40% and the temperature increases up to 5 °C, especially in the Andes Mountains, where the country’s largest water stores, the glaciers, are protected.

“The two main factors (of the climate crisis) are the use of fossil fuel pumped by the carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, which produces the greenhouse effect, which warms the average temperature of the planet. In addition, land use, such as the deforestation of forests, which causes a decrease in carbon absorption by forests,” Salazar assured EFE.

Chile is the country with the greatest drought in all of Latin America, an acute water crisis that affects, according to the General Directorate of Water (DGA), 49 communes and more than 1,600,000 people.

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