Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says
An cattle ranch in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The UN says agriculture is on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth. Photograph: Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace
A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.
It says: "Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products."
Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead author of the report, said: "Animal products cause more damage than [producing] construction minerals such as sand or cement, plastics or metals. Biomass and crops for animals are as damaging as [burning] fossil fuels."
The panel of experts ranked products, resources, economic activities and transport according to their environmental impacts. Agriculture was on a par with fossil fuel consumption because both rise rapidly with increased economic growth, they said.
Ernst von Weizsaecker, an environmental scientist who co-chaired the panel, said: "Rising affluence is triggering a shift in diets towards meat and dairy products - livestock now consumes much of the world's crops and by inference a great deal of freshwater, fertilisers and pesticides."
Both energy and agriculture need to be "decoupled" from economic growth because environmental impacts rise roughly 80% with a doubling of income, the report found.
Achim Steiner, the UN under-secretary general and executive director of the UNEP, said: "Decoupling growth from environmental degradation is the number one challenge facing governments in a world of rising numbers of people, rising incomes, rising consumption demands and the persistent challenge of poverty alleviation."
The panel, which drew on numerous studies including the Millennium ecosystem assessment, cites the following pressures on the environment as priorities for governments around the world: climate change, habitat change, wasteful use of nitrogen and phosphorus in fertilisers, over-exploitation of fisheries, forests and other resources, invasive species, unsafe drinking water and sanitation, lead exposure, urban air pollution and occupational exposure to particulate matter.
Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy products, accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use and 19% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, says the report, which has been launched to coincide with UN World Environment day on Saturday.
Prof Hertwich, who is also the director of the industrial ecology programme at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said that developing countries – where much of this population growth will take place – must not follow the western world's pattern of increasing consumption: "Developing countries should not follow our model. But it's up to us to develop the technologies in, say, renewable energy or irrigation methods."
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Earth - this 3rd rock from the sun was formed much in the same way as our sun and other planets in our solar system. Solar nebula, a gigantic cloud of dust particles and hot gases, with the main constituent elements of hydrogen and helium. As the nebula contracted our solar system was formed. During the contraction process the temperature cooled down. As a result of cooling, shrinking and rapid rotation, the outer part of the cloud got detached from the main body in the form of rings.
Each of the detached rings cooled and shrank further. Then, gradually they clustered together to form a globe. Over a period of time the temperature continued to decrease and the globe solidified into what was the beginning of Earth.
As the atmosphere of the Earth formed and stabilized over million of years, elementary life began as simple bacteria. These simple life forms gradually evolved over million and billion more years into complex life forms. And life continued to evolve and diversified into myriads of species of different shapes, sizes and complexities.
Earth has enjoyed millennia of evolution and is steaming with life; and ecosystem, species and genetic diversities. We may look at Earth now and admire the magnificent network of ecosystems and array of biodiversity. But yet, everything is interconnected and in balance until, we humans, disrupt nature's balance in the name of economic growth and progress.
This 4.5 billion year old masterpiece is under major threat, not from outer space, nor ETs (as portrayed in some high end, money making Hollywood imaginations), but from us - humans.
We have reached a planetary crisis with all the life threatening phenomena of global warming, food shortage, water scarcity, epidemic outbreaks and natural disasters. All this is the ramification of the livestock industry and we are partaking in our own demise by supporting it with our food choice of animal products.
This year we have seen some major catastrophes around the world, and more so towards the end of the year. This trend will continue in 2011 if we do not act quick by changing into a healthier and life saving vegan diet. The latest disaster is the volcano eruption in Indonesia, with 22 volcanoes active.
This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Carl Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
