Eat less meat: UN climate-change report calls for change to human diet

We don’t want to tell people what to eat, but it would 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.

QUIRIN SCHIERMEIR: ‘A 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.

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.”

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… 

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’.  SOURCE…

RELATED VIDEO: