The impact of animal agriculture on our planet can no longer be denied. The world needs to switch to plant-based foods if we are to avoid the ever increasing temperatures.
Less than a decade ago, we were heading towards the eradication of hunger. But these crises have set back decades of progress and the number of people starving has risen from 80 million in 2017 to 135 million pre-COVID. There is a real risk that this number will rise to more than 840 million by 2030 as global shocks to the food system become regular crises – a new normal none of us want to live with.
Our present situation is exacerbated by the near absence of consideration of food systems in global policy negotiations. The UN Food Systems Summit 2021 convened the world, but there is still no consensus on science-based targets, akin to the 1.5°C for the climate.
Diets and food loss and waste are largely ignored in the Nationally Determined Contributions. Even the Convention on Biological Diversity struggles to include regenerative food production and healthy foods as clear biodiversity targets.
Despite its own increased climate ambitions and net-zero emissions commitment, the EU has spent some €143m to promote European meat products in the past five years alone. That’s according to data provided by the European Commission and analysed by EUobserver.
Environmental campaigner George Monbiot has claimed farming should be abolished because meat can be replaced with food made out of lab-grown bacteria. He argues meat producers will not be able to sustainably keep up with the increase in global food demand. He suggests that the world should look at newer methods, including creating industrial quantities of protein powder using bacteria which can be used to make food such as ‘protein pancakes’ instead.
But Climate Healers says that globally, the greatest influence on climate change comes not from vehicle emissions, but from a worldwide obsession with eating meat, the resulting deforestation, and the vast amount of resources – land, water, grain – dedicated to animal agriculture. The Ecological Society’s academic journal declared in 2021 that “animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change”; it reported that animal agriculture produces 57 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a number which does not include the related deforestation costs.
The European Commission has approved an ‘End the Slaughter Age’ initiative which could help transfer much needed subsidies from the meat industry to sustainable protein.
Reports published by Friends of the Earth U.S. and The Network for Social Justice and Human Rights in Brazil exposed Bunge Limited, an American agribusiness, and food company. Bunge Limited is one of the world’s largest agribusiness companies and they continue to lead in deforestation and land grabs in Brazil, despite tremendous pressure from investors to adopt sustainable practices.
One report, Red Handed Deforestation and Bunge’s Silent Conquest: How Land-Grabbers and Soy Speculators Enable the Destruction of Brazil Cerrado, focuses on a recent case in Piauí State, Brazil, where 2,000 hectares of illegal deforestation occurred. The report says that Bunge’s near-monopoly on soy production enables deforestation and illegal land grabbing in the region.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released the third instalment of its major climate change report, following the “Code Red” warning it released last August. The report states that the world must also slash methane emissions by 33 percent by 2030 to slow climate change, but one main difference was perceived in this instalment: While the situation is dire, the report holds out hope that there is still time to act.
If the situation is hopeless, critics of climate change reporting have noted, then people throw up their hands and give up. If you give them productive, doable, effective steps, then they are incentivized to take action. The UN report appears to internalise that message: There is still time to save our planet, and the most effective thing an individual can do is shift toward eating plant-based; it is one of the easiest and most effective ways to lower our carbon footprint.
Protecting forests, changing diets, and altering farming methods could contribute around a quarter of the greenhouse gas cuts needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change, according to the United Nations’ climate panel.
“We are in the early stages of climate and agriculture policy development, but we need to start with acknowledging the urgency of the challenge,” said Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The IPCC warns that governments thus far have not been up to the task.”
Animal agriculture is also a major contributing factor to climate change. In fact, a study by Compassion in World Farming shows that meeting the Paris 1.5 °C target is impossible without tackling the issue. The food industry contributes somewhere between a quarter and a third of greenhouse gases. The livestock industry is responsible for 75 percent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, or 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions as a whole.
“Reducing meat, egg, and dairy consumption is one of the easiest and strongest levers we can use to combat climate change, pollution, and animal abuse,” said Ben Williamson, the US Executive Director of Compassion in World Farming.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released the third installment of its major climate change report, following the “Code Red” warning it released last August. The report states that the world must also slash methane emissions by 33 percent by 2030 to slow climate change, but one main difference was perceived in this instalment: While the situation is dire, the report holds out hope that there is still time to act.
Beef and climate change are in the news these days, from cows’ alleged high-methane farts (fact check: they’re actually mostly high-methane burps) to comparisons with cars and airplanes (fact check: the world needs to reduce emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture to sufficiently rein in global warming). And as with so many things in the public sphere, it’s easy for the conversation to get polarized.
Protecting forests, changing diets, and altering farming methods could contribute around a quarter of the greenhouse gas cuts needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change, according to the United Nations’ climate panel.
Dirty fossil fuels, burned to create electricity or just to transport us across town, get a lot of headlines. But there are other sources of destructive greenhouse gases, such as animal agriculture. Not only that, but animal agriculture contributes to habitat destruction, competition with wild animals, ocean dead zones, and water pollution according to the EPA as well as the horrendous cruelty to animals.
A study by Compassion in World Farming shows that meeting the Paris 1.5 °C target is impossible without tackling the issue.
Animal agriculture contributes to deforestation, including the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest in South America. Not only is land cleared for the animals raised for food, but more land is cleared to grow food for those animals in a parody of inefficiency besides ruining the beauty of forests and other habitats and killing wildlife, habitat destruction also releases carbon stores, contributing even more to climate change. Soils and water are polluted with excess animal waste directly from livestock as well as pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer for animal feed.
The European Parliament has called on the EU to promote a plant-based diet and reduce meat consumption in order to fight cancer. Cancer is Europe’s second biggest killer, with 3.7 million new cases and 1.9 million deaths every year – a quarter of the world’s cancer cases, despite constituting only an eighth of the world’s population
Recently, IPCC released a report that emphasized that the barriers to accomplishing progress on climate change are largely political, not scientific. The world has only a narrow chance of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, and is falling far behind on making the changes needed to transform the global economy to a low-carbon footing. Overshooting 1.5C is now “almost inevitable”, but the overshoot could be temporary and temperatures could be returned to 1.5C by the end of this century if countries seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically this decade.
Mounting evidence is pointing to the world having entered a sixth mass extinction. If the current rate of extinction continues we could lose most species by 2200. The implication for human health and wellbeing is dire, but not inevitable.
The global food system is in disarray. Animal agriculture is a major driver of global heating, and as many as 12 million deaths from heart disease, stroke, cancers and diabetes are each year connected to eating the wrong things, like too much red and processed meat and too few fruits and vegetables.
Unless the world can slash the amount of animal products in its food system and embrace more plant-based diets, there is little chance of avoiding dangerous levels of climate change and mounting public health problem.
Food and the climate crisis are locked in a tangled web of cause and effect. Globally, food systems contribute about a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet they are also uniquely vulnerable to climate impacts: from soaring temperatures and drought to intense rainfall and flooding.
Food production is caught in a battle between people and profits, as an increasingly industrialized system prioritizes low operating costs and high profits. In the US, nearly 40 million people don’t know where their next meal is coming from and food workers are some of the lowest paid in the country. Agriculture contributes less than 1% to GDP in the US – yet it is responsible for 11% of the country’s GHG emissions, polluted waterways and millions of acres of degraded land. “The US is such a huge contributor to climate change and we’re doing so pathetically little to address it, particularly in agriculture,” said Raj Patel, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and IPES-Food expert.
Greenhouse gases drive global warming, which threatens biodiversity, ecosystems, and human health. A significant percentage of these disastrous gases come from human food systems: one-third of the worldwide total. This includes every step of the process – from land clearing to make way for farms to producing (raising and harvesting animals and plants) to processing, packaging, and shipping the food as waste sitting in a landfill.
However, there are ways to improve many aspects of the process to generate fewer emissions. Your choices cause the improvements. For example, what you decide to eat and how much food you waste can either increase or reduce your contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.
The impact of animal agriculture on climate change can no longer be denied. Nor can an individual’s switch to a vegan diet be discounted. It is simply the best thing that anyone can do for our health and the future of the planet, humans, and animals.
The world will need a massive effort to switch to plant-based foods if we are to avoid the ever increasing temperatures. There is no time to lose. We know what we have to do, but the political will and lack of willingness to change food habits may well cause us to meet the 1,5 deadline.
