New Delhi, July 30 -- Every year, finance ministers present national budgets. Companies publish balance sheets. Families carefully plan their annual income and expenditure. We instinctively understand a simple truth: if expenditure consistently exceeds income, bankruptcy is inevitable.

Yet humanity has never applied this same discipline to the only form of capital upon which every economy ultimately depends - Nature.

On 30 July this year, the world is observing Earth Overshoot Day, the date when humanity is expected to have consumed all the biological resources that the Earth can regenerate during the entire year. From 1 August until 31 December, we are no longer living on Nature's annual ' salary' or income. We are going to borrow from...