The report released Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the first comprehensive look at how land influences climate change, and vice versa. The findings: Land use — specifically how we grow, get and eat our food — is a major driver of climate change.
“The food system as a whole, which includes food production and processing, transport, retail consumption, loss and waste is currently responsible for up to a third of our global greenhouse gas emission, ” said IPCC Co-Chair Eduardo Calvo Buendía, at a press conference Thursday morning.
These practices warm the planet and harm our global food supply, causing cascading effects — decreased biodiversity, damaged ecosystems, degraded forests and lands — across the planet.
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A hotter world is primed for more droughts, wildfires, insect outbreaks and extreme weather events, making it harder to grow the food needed to sustain a growing population, one that’s expected to hit 10 billion people by 2050.
“Climate change creates additional stresses on land, exacerbating existing risks to livelihoods, biodiversity, human and ecosystem health, infrastructure, and food systems, ” stated the report.
There’s a lot going on here, and authors of the report admitted the complexity of measuring carbon emissions from land use compared to carbon emissions from the energy sector.
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Land has historically been a powerful carbon sink, absorbing and storing excess carbon dioxide and buffering the effects of climate change. Currently, land absorbs 29 percent of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions. If we’re not careful, however, land may shift from a carbon sink to a carbon source, fueling our climate crisis rather than defending us against it.
If that happens, we put increasingly vulnerable communities at risk. If we hit 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050, habitat degradation is expected to affect 178 million, the report stated. If we hit 2 degrees, 220 million people will be threatened by water stress and drought. The people most affected will be the elderly, the very young, women and low-income populations.
Like other climate change problems, there is no one silver-bullet solution. Instead, the report recommends a collaborative approach that combines policy, farming and individual consumer choices.
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“The level of risk posed by climate change depends both on the level of warming and on how population, consumption, production, technological development, and land management patterns evolve, ” the report said.
Some farming solutions include increasing soil organic matter, controlling erosion and improving fertilizer and crop management. For livestock, that means better grazing land management, improved manure management and higher-quality feed.
But it’s not just farmers who must change their actions. Everyone must play a role in fixing our food systems — from policymakers and city planners to private sector companies and especially consumers. At the individual level, we need to change our eating habits. Every decision we make at the grocery store sends a message to food manufacturers.
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One immediate choice you can make, the report suggested, is to invest in a more plant-based diet. This message aligns with Earth Day Network’s Foodprints for the Future campaign, which drives home connections between food and climate to encourage accessible, affordable, low impact plant-based diets.
“Balanced diets, featuring plant-based foods, such as those based on coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, and animal-sourced food produced in resilient, sustainable and low-[greenhouse gas] emission systems, present major opportunities for adaptation and mitigation while generating significant co-benefits in terms of human health, ” the report said.
Animal agriculture puts a lot of stress on the environment, using many natural resources and producing large amounts of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. The U.N. report stated that “a shift toward plant-based diets” is one of the most significant ways to reduce greenhouse gases from the agriculture sector.
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To cut emissions, we also need to decrease our food waste, the report noted. Currently, 25 to 30 percent of the world’s food is lost or wasted. All that food has a big carbon footprint — if food waste were a country, it would the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, after the U.S. and China.
Dietary habits, of course, are more than personal decisions. Diets are driven by availability and affordability of food, geography and cultural habits. That’s why policy must also be part of the solution. We must enact policies that operate across the food system, cutting back waste, influencing food choices and enabling more sustainable land-use practices.
“Such policies can contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation, reduce land degradation, desertification and poverty as well as improve public health, ” the report said.
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Additionally, we must invest in innovation and diversity in land management practices. For the first time, the IPCC specifically referenced indigenous people and their knowledge of local land use practices to overcome challenges of climate change, food security and land degradation.
With all this in mind, we need to act fast. Simply adapting to a warmer world won’t cut it if we wish to avoid a climate catastrophe.
“Delaying action as is assumed in high emissions scenarios could result in some irreversible impacts on some ecosystems, which in the longer-term has the potential to lead to substantial additional [greenhouse gas] emissions from ecosystems that would accelerate global warming, ” the report said.
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Our climate crisis is growing each day, but it’s not insurmountable. As the report explained, by acting across sectors, we can curb climate change while seizing the benefits of sustainable development, like bolstered economies, reduced inequality and better health.
The power is on your plate.Join Earth Day Network’s Foodprints for the Future campaign to learn how you can reduce your carbon footprint, one bite at a time.Human activity is “unequivocally” responsible for climate change and humanity has only a few years left to keep the planet from warming 1.5°C past post-industrial levels, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report published today. In its sixth report, the IPCC gathered all available information about the state of climate change to find, with certainty, that human activity is responsible for the 1.1°C spike in temperature which has led to increased floods and droughts, rising sea levels, heatwaves, melting glaciers, and more. Some of the damage humans have done is irreversible.
“[This report] is a code red for humanity, ” UN Secretary General António Guterres said. “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk.”
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In its report, the IPCC outlines the urgency with which humanity needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to limit the planet’s warming. “It really requires unprecedented transformational change, rapid and immediate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, ” Ko Barrett, the former vice chair of the IPCC, told CNN. “The idea that there is still a pathway forward is a point that should give us some hope.”
The nearly 4, 000-page IPCC report was released ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders from 197 countries will meet to discuss strategies to combat the global climate crisis. This week’s IPCC report will be supplemented by two additional reports to be published next year, one of which will focus on solutions.
According to vegan climate activist Greta Thunberg, the IPCC report shows that world leaders can no longer ignore the climate crisis and must act now to make substantial progress. “According to the new IPCC report, the carbon budget that gives us the best odds of staying below 1.5°C runs out in less than five and a half years at our current emissions rate, ” Thunberg tweeted. “Maybe someone should ask the people in power how they plan to ‘solve’ that.”
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To spotlight how animal agriculture is often ignored during climate talks, Thunberg recently released For Nature, a film she created in partnership with animal-rights organization Mercy for Animals. In the film, Thunberg discusses how fossil fuels are often seen as the “villains” of the climate crisis, but animal agriculture—which contributes to one-fourth of total greenhouse gas emissions—is mostly ignored. Approximately 30 percent of the world’s ice-less land mass is used for animal agriculture and 33 percent of all cropland is used to grow food for those animals. Thunberg explains that if everyone were to adopt a plant-based diet, we would save up to 8 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually and use 76 percent less land.
Thunberg—who criticized world leaders for eating lavish animal-based meals at the recent G7 conference in Cornwall, England—isn’t the only climate activist who sees animal agriculture as the driving force behind the climate crisis. Last year, legendary primatologist Jane Goodall also voiced her concern over the role of animal agriculture, particularly meat production, in the climate crisis.
“If we would just stop eating all of this meat, the difference would be huge because all of these billions of farm animals … kept in concentration camps to feed us, and, you know, whole environments are wiped out to grow the grain to feed them, ” Goodall said. “Masses of fossil fuel are used to get the grain to the animals, the animals
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