RAC member, Paul Appleby, reviews a report by the Changing Markets Foundation in collaboration with Mighty Earth and Compassion in World Farming. Growing the Good makes the case for a low-carbon transition in the food sector. The report wastes no time in identifying the scale of the problem posed by the animal agriculture industry:
In total, livestock are responsible for around 16.5% of the world’s GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, and are the leading source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions. If expected forecasts for growth in meat and dairy consumption materialise, there will be almost no room within the total allowable global emissions budget for any sectors other than agriculture by 2050. … Studies overwhelmingly suggest that a shift towards healthier diets, lower meat and dairy consumption and significant food-waste reductions is an essential condition to ensure the world’s temperature keeps below a 2°C increase, as agreed by the world’s governments at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference of the United Nations.
Animal agriculture is an extremely resource-intensive way to feed people; today, 70–80% of all agricultural land, including a quarter of all cropland, is required for pasture and the production of feed. This totals one-third of the planets’ ice-free land surface. … We are currently experiencing what scientists call the sixth great mass extinction in the Earth’s history; one of the foremost underlying drivers of this is animal agriculture, estimated to account for about 60% of human-caused biodiversity loss on land.
Finally, the excessive consumption of animal products in high-income countries is already between two and three times higher than what is considered healthy, and is associated with an increased incidence of diet-related disease. Mounting scientific evidence is linking our excessive consumption of livestock products, particularly red and processed meat, with increasing incidence of cancer, obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
The report goes on to document the impacts of livestock rearing on climate change, land use, deforestation and biodiversity loss, and health and food security, before examining the immense financial power of the livestock sector, the rise of meat alternatives, and the need for a low-carbon transition in the food system. A particularly eye-catching diagram compares the Earth’s land mammals by weight: at 34 million tons, the world’s wild animals are overshadowed by humans (358 million tons) and their domesticated animals, including cattle, sheep, pigs and goats (520, 136, 90 and 39 million tons, respectively), not forgetting their companion animals (49 million tons).
Faced with this gloomy prognosis, the report identifies an “absence of policies to drive reduction in meat and dairy consumption, and to promote more sustainable diets and food-production systems”, warning that “climate action in (the livestock) sector cannot wait any longer, and the window of opportunity to meet internationally agreed climate targets is closing.” By way of solution, the report puts forward a series of policy recommendations, including updating fiscal policies to reduce the demand for meat, shifting subsidies away from factory farming, incentivising the production of underused protein crops such as pulses, and funding the research and development of plant-based meat alternatives.
However, the report stops short of setting targets for reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products. For this, we should turn to a study published in the 25 October 2018 issue of Nature (https://www.ndph.ox.ac.uk/news/feeding-10-billion-people-by-2050-within-planetary-limits-may-be-achievable-say-researchers). In this study, the researchers examined a range of options for reducing the environmental effects of the food system, including dietary changes towards healthier, more plant-based diets, improvements in technologies and management, and reductions in food loss and waste. The only combination of options that would stay within the planetary boundary for greenhouse gas emissions was one requiring “ambitious dietary change towards more plant-based, flexitarian diets, in combination with either reductions in food loss and waste or technological improvements.” The flexitarian diet defined by the study was one based on global dietary guidelines for healthy eating but with “more stringent limits for red meat (one serving a week), white meat (half a portion a day) and dairy (one portion a day).” A vegan diet, which has been shown to produce considerably lower greenhouse gas emissions than low meat or vegetarian diets (Climatic Change 2014; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1169-1), would leave us more room to manoeuvre.
Access the report here
This article was first published by the author on the OxVeg blog
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
