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.
Quirin Schiermeier
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A cowboy drives cattle at a farm in the Brazilian rainforest
Cattle farming, shown here in northern Brazil, is emission-intensive and often accompanies large-scale deforestation.Credit: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty
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.
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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.
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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.”
Paris goals
Although the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transport garners the most attention, activities relating to land management, including agriculture and forestry, produce almost one-quarter of heat-trapping gases resulting from human activities. The race to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels ― the goal of the international Paris climate agreement made in 2015 ― might be a lost cause unless land is used in a more sustainable and climate-friendly way, the latest IPCC report says.
