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It does this by measuring the productive land and sea area available – cropland and pasture, forests and fishing grounds – and matching that against the demands placed on them. This biological accountancy system concludes that planet Earth has a biocapacity of 12 billion hectares, and a human demand equivalent to 18 billion hectares. Hence the 1.5 Earths figure. Our footprint is 50 per cent too big.

I had assumed that the analysis assessed the damaging environmental consequences of how we use the land – things like soil erosion and the overuse of water reserves. But no. It only measures land area.

“Local ecosystem abuse is a significant problem [but] to make reliable adjustments would require data sets that do not exist,” he writes. Or, as he told me: “Our current accounts cannot include soil erosion. Hence cropland use equals cropland availability.”

It uses UN statistics to compare the timber we harvest against annual growth. The conclusion is that, while we are deforesting some areas, growth elsewhere more than makes up for the loss. This is reflected in a surplus in the accounts.

If the calculation is to be believed, while some fish stocks are being over-exploited, a greater number are under-exploited and overall fish biomass is increasing. That’s another surplus