Less Meat, More Plants: The Food We Eat Is Driving Global Warming, UN Report Finds

Topline: A new United Nations report from 107 leading scientists warned that climate change threatened the world’s food supply, and tackling the problem would require big changes to eating habits and farming methods.

• Eating less red meat and more plant-based food can make people healthier and store up to 15% more of current CO2 emissions by 2050, the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found. Consumption of meat in the West is “far too much,” professor Pete Smith, from Aberdeen University in the U.K., said. 
• Earth’s landmasses, which make up 30% of the globe, are heating up twice as fast as the planet overall. While carbon dioxide, a major heat-trapping gas, is helping to make plants grow and become greener, scientists found that it also reduces nutritional value in some crops including wheat. Experiments show wheat suffered a 6%-13% drop in protein in high CO2 environments.
• More extreme weather events could see food chains disrupted. Another 0.9° F (0.5° C) of warming could cause a “high” risk of thawing permafrost, wildfire damage and unstable food supplies 10 and 30 years from now. If we see another 1.8 degrees ( 1degree C) of warming in the next 50 years, the likelihood of those risks are projected to be “very high.”
• Cutting down of food waste can also free up millions of square miles of land. Up to 30% of all food produced is lost or wasted, the report said.
• Agriculture and forestry account for 23% of the heat-trapping gases that are warming the earth, a figure which rises to 37% once packaging, transporting food and energy consumption is taken into account, scientists found. Between 2007 and 2016, agriculture and forestry pumped 5.7 billion tons of CO2 into the air, but pulled 12.3 billion tons out, AP reported. But land emissions are still rising because of man-made deforestation in the Amazon.
• Better land and soil management can help improve food security. Improved farming practices, including better-targeted fertilizer and no-till agriculture, could help fight climate change.

Crucial quote: “We ought to recognize that we have profound limits on the amount of land available, and we have to be careful about how we utilize it,” said Chris Field, head of environmental services at Stanford University.

Tangent: Man-made deforestation levels in Brazil are at their highest in four years, according to the country’s space agency, INPE. Some 2,254 square kilometers were cut in July, more than double the monthly figure seen at any time since August 2015.