Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal.

The majority of the world currently follow an economic paradigm that seeks to grow all three of the IPAT parameters: population size, affluence and use of technology.

A recent review of the World 3 demographic model by KPMG also concludes that humans need to rethink their pursuit of economic growth or anticipate collapse by 2040.

[12] It is important to bear in mind that the data collected by the Global Footprint Network (GFN) makes the assumption that the whole biocapacity of the Earth is entirely at the disposal of humanity.

[13] A crisis of human behaviour (the Human Behavioural Crisis) has been highlighted as the driver of anthropogenic ecological overshoot in a peer-reviewed World Scientists' Warning paper led by Joseph J. Merz and co-authored by William E. Rees, Phoebe Barnard et al.[14] The most well known symptom of ecological overshoot is the rising extinction rate.

[15] Biocapacity is measured by calculating the amount of biologically productive land and sea area available to provide the resources a population consumes and to absorb its wastes, given the prevailing technology and management practices.

In 2024, fourteen academics well known for their publications and efforts to warn humanity about the dangers of ongoing climate change published a "Special Report" in the journal BioScience where they attributed the "risk of societal collapse" to the underlying cause of "overshoot.

Global heating, although it is catastrophic, is merely one aspect of a profound polycrisis that includes environmental degradation, rising economic inequality, and biodiversity loss.

Climate change is a glaring symptom of a deeper systemic issue: ecological overshoot, where human consumption outpaces the Earth's ability to regenerate.