Farming and diets must shift to protect biodiversity – report
Agriculture needs to become more nature-friendly to halt global wildlife losses according to a new report, writes Emily Beament
ASHIFT to plant-heavy diets, protecting land and more naturefriendly farming are needed to stem the accelerating loss of wildlife, a UN-backed report has warned.
The study from Chatham House said the global rate of extinction of wild species is “orders of magnitude” higher than the average over the past 10 million years.
The global food system is the primary driver for this, as wildlife-rich forests and savannah have been converted for land to grow crops or graze livestock, while efforts to produce cheap food has driven harmful intensive agriculture.
How humans produce and consume food is also increasing the risk of diseases spreading from animals and helping fuel climate change, accounting for around 30% of total human-produced emissions, the report said.
It calls for a dietary shift from meat to eating more plant-heavy diets worldwide to combat the outsized impact that farming animals has on nature, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Farmers have in the past argued that low-impact livestock rearing on pasture in the Westcountry, suited to growing grass, is a sustainable low-carbon option very different from intensive beef production overseas and rainforest deforestation to create land for livestock, and that differing kinds of meat production should not be lumped together.
The report supported by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming also said more land needs to be protected and set aside for nature, with a focus on preventing new land being converted from wild habitat to farmland, and restoring natural landscapes on spared agricultural land.
And there is a need to farm in a more “naturefriendly” way that supports biodiversity, limits the use of inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides and replaces monocultures with mixed farming systems.
There is also a need to cut food waste to help reduce pressure on land, the study said.
Changes to diets away from meat and dairy are also required so that land can be freed up and returned to nature, the authors argue. This would allow widespread adoption of nature-friendly farming without increasing the pressure to switch more natural land to agriculture.
The study pointed to data which shows that nearly four-fifths of the world’s agricultural land is for livestock grazing or growing animal feed crops, even though the majority of calories and protein comes from plant-based foods.
And it said intensive agriculture harms soils, air, water and nature, and creates cheaper crops that can be fed to animals instead of people, driving growth in the meat industry, while making food less nutritious and more often wasted.
Susan Gardner, director of UNEP’s Ecosystems Division, said: “Our current food system is a double edged sword – shaped by decades of the “cheaper food” paradigm, aimed at producing more food, quickly and cheaply without taking into account the hidden costs to biodiversity and its life-supporting services, and to our own health.
“Reforming the way we produce and consume food is an urgent priority – we need to change global dietary patterns, protect and set aside land for nature and farm in a more nature-friendly and biodiversity-supporting way.”
Professor Tim Benton at Chatham House said: “The biggest threats to biodiversity arise from exploitative land use – converting natural habitats to agriculture and farming land intensively – and these are driven by the economic demand for producing ever more calorie-rich, but nutritionally poor, food from fewer and fewer commodities grown at scale.”