How Eating Less Meat Helps Stop Climate Change

 How Eating Less Meat Helps Stop Climate Change

Eat less meat: UN climate-change report calls for change to human diet

The report on global land use and agriculture comes amid accelerating deforestation in the Amazon.

Efforts to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and the impacts of global warming will fall significantly short without drastic changes in global land use, agriculture and human diets, leading researchers warn in a high-level report commissioned by the United Nations.

The special report on climate change and land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes plant-based diets as a major opportunity for mitigating and adapting to climate change ― and includes a policy recommendation to reduce meat consumption.

On 8 August, the IPCC released a summary of the report, which is designed to inform upcoming climate negotiations amid the worsening global climate crisis. More than 100 experts, around half of whom hail from developing countries, worked to compile the report in recent months.

“We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” says Hans-Otto Pörtner, an ecologist who co-chairs the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”

Deforestation concerns

Researchers also note the relevance of the report to tropical rainforests, with concerns mounting about accelerating rates of deforestation. The Amazon rainforest is a huge carbon sink that acts to cool global temperature, but rates of deforestation are rising, in part because of the policies and actions of the government of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

Unless stopped, deforestation could turn much of the remaining Amazon forests into a degraded type of desert, and could release more than 50 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in 30 to 50 years, says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paolo in Brazil. “That’s very worrying,” he says.

“Unfortunately, some countries don’t seem to understand the dire need of stopping deforestation in the tropics,” says Pörtner. “We cannot force any government to interfere. But we hope that our report will sufficiently influence public opinion to that effect.”

Careful management

The report cautions that land must remain productive to feed a growing world population. Warming enhances plant growth in some regions, but in others ― including northern Eurasia, parts of North America, Central Asia and tropical Africa ― increasing water stress seems to reduce vegetation. So the use of biofuel crops and the creation of new forests ― seen as measures with the potential to mitigate global warming ― must be carefully managed to avoid the risk of food shortages and biodiversity loss, the report says.

Farmers and communities around the world must also grapple with more intense rainfall, floods and droughts resulting from climate change, warns the IPCC. Land degradation and expanding deserts threaten to affect food security, increase poverty and drive migration.

About one-quarter of Earth’s ice-free land area seems to be suffering from human-induced soil degradation already ― and climate change is expected to make thing worse, particularly in low-lying coastal areas, river deltas, drylands and permafrost areas. Sea-level rise is also adding to coastal erosion in some regions, the report says.

Industrialized farming practices are responsible for much of the observed soil erosion, and for soil pollution, says André Laperrière, the executive director of Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition in Wallingford, UK, an initiative that aims to make relevant scientific information accessible worldwide.

The report might provide a much-needed, authoritative call to action, he says. “The biggest hurdle we face is to try and teach about half a billion farmers globally to re-work their agricultural model to be carbon sensitive.”

Nobre also hopes that the IPCC’s voice will give greater prominence to land-use issues in upcoming climate talks. “I think that the policy implications of the report will be positive in terms of pushing all tropical countries to aim at reducing deforestation rates,” he says.

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