meat consumption

Global climate progress is too slow

December 28, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

According to a new report by the World Resources Institute, the world is making progress on climate, but the progress is not fast enough. The report looked at 37 indicators of climate progress towards the goals set forth by the Paris Agreement. In some areas, the progress has been substantial, but in six areas, the world has been moving in the wrong direction entirely.

The rapid growth of clean energy has brought the world to the brink of peak fossil fuels, but to avoid the catastrophic effects of warming, countries need to build out wind and solar power nearly twice as fast and shut down coal plants seven times faster. There has been progress in curbing deforestation, but the world needs to stem forest loss four times more quickly. More work is needed to clean up heavy industry and the consumption of meat needs to be limited more than the present level.

Areas where things are getting worse rather than better include the use of public funds and subsidies for preserving the use of fossil fuels. Because of wars and supply shocks affecting energy markets, countries have actually ramped up fossil fuel subsidies to combat rising prices.

One area where the world is moving at the pace required to meet climate goals is in the sales of electric vehicles. EVs accounted for 10% of car sales globally last year and if trends continue, they are predicted to account for more than 75% of cars sold by 2030.

The faster-than-predicted progress on electric cars demonstrates that transformative change is possible and could happen in other areas.

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World Making Too Little Progress on Climate — Except on EV Sales, Report Finds

Photo, posted May 24, 2022, courtesy of Ivan Radic via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Farming the frozen north

November 28, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Agriculture is the primary cause of land-based biodiversity loss. As the global population grows, agricultural production needs to keep pace. Estimates are that production needs to double by 2050. How this can be accomplished without doing further harm to the environment and biodiversity is extremely challenging.

Climate change adds further complications to the challenge. As the climate warms in the middle latitudes, agricultural zones may need to shift northward to regions which have evolved to have more suitable climates. This represents a very real threat to the wilderness areas of Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia. These places represent a significant fraction of the world’s wilderness areas outside of Antarctica.

According to researchers at the University of Exeter in the UK, if the forces driving climate change are not diminished, over the next 40 years warming temperatures are expected to make more than 1 million square miles newly suitable for growing crops. As cropland goes barren in areas that have warmed too much, northern wilderness could be turned over to farming. The vital integrity of these valuable areas could be irreversibly lost.

The study, published in the journal Current Biology, also says that climate change will shrink the variety of crops that can be grown on 72% of the land that is currently farmed worldwide. Given this situation along with the rising global population, it is essential that land be used more efficiently. We can feed a larger population from the farmland we already have, but people need to reduce meat consumption, cut food waste, and grow crops suited to their local climate.

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Warming Could Make Northern Wilderness Ripe for Farming, Study Finds

Photo, posted September 7, 2016, courtesy of Scott via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Why Choose Chicken Over Beef?

July 22, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Food production is a major driver of climate change. It’s responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. But the environmental impact of different foods varies greatly, and making seemingly insignificant changes can actually have significant impacts.

According to a first-ever national study of U.S. eating habits and their carbon footprints, choosing chicken over beef will cut your dietary carbon footprint in half.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey asked more than 16,000 participating Americans to name all the foods they consumed in the past 24 hours. The research team then calculated the carbon footprint of what people said they ate. If a respondent consumed broiled beef steak, for example, researchers calculated what the carbon footprint would have been had broiled chicken been consumed instead.

The study’s findings illustrate how making one simple substitution can significantly reduce a person’s dietary carbon footprint. A diet’s carbon footprint is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that result from the energy, fertilizer, land use, and other inputs necessary to produce food.

In general, animal-based foods have a bigger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. For example, producing beef uses 20 times the land and emits 20 times the emissions as growing beans (per gram of protein), and requires 10 times more resources than producing chicken.

According to the World Resources Institute, keeping the increase in global warming below 2°C will be impossible without limiting the global rise in meat consumption.

Last year, the EAT-Lancet Commission report found that a radical transformation of the global food system was needed because it’s threatening the stability of the climate.

Make a change – big or small – today.

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Choosing chicken over beef cuts our carbon footprints a surprising amount

Photo, posted August 30, 2011, courtesy of Ken Hawkins via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Meat Consumption & Biodiversity

September 10, 2015 By EarthWise

Several studies warn that the current loss and decline of species is contributing to what appears to be the beginning of earth’s sixth mass extinction. More than 400 species have gone extinct in the last 100 years. And scientists suggest up to 37 percent of the world’s species could go extinct within the next 35 years.