Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021626
AGRICULTURE
IMPACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Your mouth can help stop climate change — if it eats less meat ... It's not just energy or transportation, we also have to address agriculture emissions.
IMPACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Your mouth can help stop climate change — if it eats less meat ... It's not just energy or transportation, we also have to address agriculture emissions.
Image credit: Flickr / Steven Penton.
Original article: https://www.zmescience.com/science/shifting-plant-based-diets-tackle-climate-crisis-01022022/
Burgess COMMENTARY
There is foundational good sense in this article and that is good. In my view it will not, however, achieve much change in practical terms because it is talking to an audience that cannot do the things that are described at the scale at which they are presented.
I am trying to address this with the TrueValueMetrics (TVM) program. I want TVM to be a system or framework of management metrics that help anyone and everyone to do as much as they can do to change their behavior in ways that are positive for themselves and society, for the environment and for the business segment of the socio-enviro-economic system.
A huge amount of development research has gone into making processed foods that are profitable using conventional financial analysis to determine 'profitable'. Agriculture generally has also migrated more and more to practices that are the most 'profitable' for all the big and powerful players. Again using conventional thinking about 'profitable'.
What needs to happen is for the analysis to migrate from this singular profit focus to an analysis framework like TVM where ALL the impacts and ALL the costs are taken into consideration, and the whole system optimized using these criteria.
Everyone should be able to have enough food to provide adequate nutrition. This is a more important goal than all the huge ranchers being in a position to grow from being millionaires to being billionaires! Some of this food may be meat, but most of the food should be plant based. It is healthy and way more sustainable.
I was a young child during WWII in England. There were all sorts of war shortages including food. Everyone that had a garden, however small, grew as much vegetables and fruit as they could and I had an amazingly healthy diet from our modest sized garden. Better yet, the supply chain from our garden to our kitchen and dining room was very short and the food eaten at absolutely the right ripeness and freshness. Today, I cannot stand modern supermarket fruit like the strawberries that look beautiful and red, but have no taste whatsoever because they have been harvested green and turned to red artificially while in transit for many miles and days. Much the same goes for many other foods. Local grow agriculture has many advantages except that it is not 'profit' competitive with mega-farm corporate monoculture.
The TVM framework is all about effectively managing this ... and hopefully what will eventually emerge is a fully fledged multi-dimension management accounting system for every aspect of the socio-enviro-economic system that impacts everything. I have work to do on ... but progress is being made!!!!!!
Peter Burgess
It's not just energy or transportation, we also have to address agriculture emissions.
by Fermin Koop ... Fermin Koop is a reporter from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds an MSc from Reading University (UK) on Environment and Development and is specialized in environment and climate change news.
February 2, 2022
Eliminating the use of animals as food would substantially reduce our emissions of greenhouse gas emissions and give us a fighting chance against the climate crisis, a new study. Researchers called for a massive switch to a plant-based diet, as the replacement of fossil fuels for renewables won’t be enough to meet climate goals.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations that animal agriculture accounts for 14.5% of all emissions, but this is almost certainly an underestimate. Animal agriculture accounts for an oversized part of our total agricultural emissions, and research is increasingly showing that reducing our consumption of animal products (especially red meat) could make a real difference.
A large part of the emissions impact of animal agriculture comes from methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), which are more potent than CO2 but decay more rapidly. While these emissions can be reduced by increasing efficiency and yields, for example, this won’t have the same impact as a transition to a plant-rich diet, the researchers argue.
“We wanted to answer a very simple question: What would be the impact of a global phase-out of animal agriculture on atmospheric greenhouse gases and their global-heating impact?” Patrick Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods and a professor emeritus at Stanford University, who co-authored the paper, said in a statement.
Turning away from beef
Brown and Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics at UC Berkeley, used publicly available data on livestock production, livestock-linked emissions, and biomass recovery potential on land currently used to support livestock to predict how the phaseout of all or parts of global animal agriculture production would alter net anthropogenic emissions.
They then used a simple climate model to project how these changes would impact the evolution of atmospheric GHG levels and warming for the rest of the century. They calculated the combined impact of reduced emissions and biomass recovery by comparing the reduction of emissions under different livestock replacement scenarios.
The two researchers looked at four specific dietary scenarios: replacing all animal agriculture now with a plant-based diet, a more gradual one, a more realistic one, with a 15-year transition to plant-based diets, and forms of each to replace beef with plant-based products. For each, they assumed that non-agriculture emissions would remain high.
Based on their climate model, the researchers estimated that phasing out animal agriculture over the next 15 years would cut 68% of CO2 emissions by 2100. This would provide 52% of the emission-reduction necessary to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, the goal included in the Paris Agreement on climate change signed by every country.
“The combined effect is both astoundingly large, and – equally important – fast, with much of the benefit realized by 2050,” Brown said in a statement. “If animal agriculture were phased out over 15 years and all other greenhouse-gas emissions were to continue unabated, the phase-out would create a 30-year pause in net emissions.”
Still, Brown and Eisen acknowledge that the transition away from animal agriculture will face many obstacles and create many additional challenges. Meat, dairy, and eggs are a major component of global human diets, and the raising of livestock is integral to rural economies, with over a billion people making their living from animal agriculture.
The substantial global investment will be required to ensure that the people who currently make a living from animal agriculture do not suffer when it is reduced or replaced. Policymakers will also have to pursue investment to prevent food insecurity in regions where wide access to a diverse and healthy plant-based diet is currently lacking.
Although animal products currently provide, according to the recent FAO data, 18% of the calories, 40% of the protein, and 45% of the fat in the human food supply, they are not necessary to feed the global population, they argue. Existing crops could replace the calories, protein, and fat from animals with a vastly reduced environmental impact.
“We have shown that global dietary change provides a powerful complement to the indispensable transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy systems. The challenge we face is not choosing which to pursue, but rather in determining how best to overcome the many social, economic and political challenges to implement both,” the researchers wrote.
It’s fair to say that Brown, as the founder of Impossible Foods, would likely benefit economically from the reduction of animal agriculture. Nevertheless, the findings of his study are based on academic research and are in line with many previous studies that have highlighted over the years the climate footprint of the food sector overall and the need to address it.
The study was published in the journal PLOS Climate.
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- Nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from US agriculture Robin R. White et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2017
- Chapter 14: The Uncertain Impact of Cellular Agriculture Carolyn S. Mattick, World Scientific Book
- An Ostomy Self-management Telehealth Intervention for Cancer Survivors: Technology-Related Findings From a Randomized Controlled Trial Ronald S Weinstein et al., J Med Internet Res, 2021
- Chapter 13: Agricultural Sources of Greenhouse Gases World Scientific Book