University of Exeter’s Tom Powell. Credit: University of Exeter
If people like me in the developed world eat less steak, it could free up room for plants to reduce CO2 levels in the air driving climate change. That’s one forecast that has come from Tom Powell and Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter, who have studied how much space we’ll need for food in the future. “The impact on the environment of trying to produce the food demanded by the world’s population in the future could be disastrous, unless we make the production system much more efficient,” Tom told Simple Climate. “By far the easiest way to do this would be to cut meat eating, especially beef. Meat is likely to get more expensive as the resources needed to produce it become limited, and its environmental impact grows. Small changes to our diets and the ways we produce food have the potential to make what is currently a very environmentally damaging system a much more positive one.”
When we’re buying food, its climate impact may not be immediately obvious. But plants use the sun’s energy to take CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow, storing that energy and CO2 in their bodies for a comparatively short time. “We can’t escape the links between our energy use, whether it’s for diet, industry or transport, and the carbon cycle,” Tom underlined. “Unfortunately, the carbon cycle also controls a sort of global thermostat, with the amount in the atmosphere as CO2 or methane influencing the climate.”
Tim and Tom noted that as the number of us on the planet grows, and we get wealthier, we are demanding more energy, both as food and fuel. “This is having damaging effects on ecosystems, and even on the world’s climate as the population grows toward 9.5 billion people all aspiring to a western lifestyle,” Tom underlined. As people get richer they also eat more meat – but meat production is hugely inefficient. Only about three or four parts in 100 of the feed energy livestock eat becomes food, with the rest lost as manure, heat, methane and slaughter by-products. Today, meat consumption provides one-sixth of the energy people across the world get from their food on average. However, people in rich countries eat much more meat, getting almost one third of their energy from it. Read the rest of this entry »
