Livestock production major cause of global warming

Amazed at the conclusions of the July 2 writer of “Cattle solution to promote health of Maui ecosystem.” I looked at Wikipedia. The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that industrial agriculture and overfishing are the primary drivers of the extinction crisis, with the meat and dairy industries having a substantial impact.

The 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, states that “the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally, it is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases, and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity, and in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of water pollution.”

On Aug. 8, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released a summary of the 2019 special report, which asserted that a shift toward plant-based diets would help to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

According to a 2018 study in the journal Nature, a significant reduction in meat consumption will be “essential” to mitigate climate change.

In November 2017, 15,364 world scientists signed a “Warning to Humanity” calling for, among other things, drastically diminishing our per capita consumption of meat.

Livestock production is a major cause of global warming. Also, consider the people working inside those meat-processing plants, which are now hot spots for spreading COVID19.

Renee Riley

Kihei