‘Less meat will help planet’
– Not everyone needs to become a vegetarian, much less vegan, to keep the planet from overheating, but it would surely make things easier if they did.
That’s the ambiguous and – for many on either side of this meaty issue – unsatisfying conclusion of the most comprehensive report yet compiled on the link between climate change and how we feed ourselves, released this week by the United Nations.
The core findings are crystal clear: climate change is threatening the world’s food supply, even the way we produce food fuels global warming.
Rising temperatures in tropical zones are starting to shrink yields and sap essential nutrients from food plants.
At the same time, the global food system – from farm to food court – accounts for at least a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
With two billion more mouths to feed by mid-century, it cannot be scaled up without pushing Earth’s thermometer deep into the red zone, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report.
More than a quarter of today’s food-related emissions come from cattle and sheep.
“Today’s IPCC report identifies the enormous impact that our dietary choices have on the environment,” commented Alan Dangour, a nutrition and global health expert at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
“Reducing the demand for meat in diets is an important approach to lowering the environmental impact of the food system.”
The livestock industry is a double climate threat: it replaces CO2-absorbing forests – notably in subtropical Brazil – with land for grazing and soy crops for cattle feed. The animals also belch huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
On average, beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases per unit of edible protein than basic plant proteins, notes the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based policy think tank.
For all these reasons, the IPCC concludes, gravitating towards “balanced diets, featuring plantbased foods” would hugely help the climate change cause.
This may sound like a ringing endorsement of vegetarianism, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the world must, or should, eschew meat altogether, the IPCC said.
Besides “coarse grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds”, that “balanced diet” also includes “animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable and low greenhouse gas emission systems”, the report concluded.
There are likely several reasons the 100-plus authors stopped short of calling for a ban on carbon-intensive red meat.
Globally, consumption of all four major meats – beef, pork, chicken and lamb – are projected to rise over the next five year, according to industry analysts.