Our Food System Is the Bullseye for Solving the World’s Climate Challenges
Our Food System Is the Bullseye for Solving the World’s Climate Challenges
The industrialized food system is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not a major topic at climate talks.
I found this article on mronline.org. It claims that moving away from animal rearing for meat harvest will be instrumental in combating climate change. Some interesting excerpts:
A systems engineering analysis of climate science and animal agriculture published in the Journal of Ecological Society in 2019 by Sailesh Rao, the founder and executive director of Climate Healers, an environmental nonprofit, backs up the claim that the majority of analyses of agricultural emissions are low. Rao’s paper found that “animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change, responsible for at least 87 percent of greenhouse gas emissions annually.”
In a research study led by the University of Oxford and published in the journal Nature Food in July 2023, it was found that adopting a vegan diet resulted in significant reductions in climate-heating emissions, water pollution, and land usage, reaching an impressive 75 percent decrease compared to diets containing over 100 grams of meat per day. Furthermore, the study highlighted that vegan diets also played a crucial role in reducing the destruction of wildlife by 66 percent and cutting water consumption by 54 percent.
Beef is so resource-intensive to produce, that it requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases per gram of edible protein than beans, lentils, and peas—all commonly farmed plant proteins, according to the World Resources Institute.
“Concurrently replacing all animal-based items in the U.S. diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste,” according to a 2018 study by an international team of researchers published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors note that the results of their study “highlight the importance of dietary shifts to improving food availability and security.”
Of course most people who have looked into this topic know about this stuff already. But the numbers themselves are staggering. For example, moving U.S. diet to being plant based feeding 350 million additional people. I had not considered that angle before.
Can’t wait until meat is mass produced in labs.