Climate Emergency Diaries #3
Food and Climate Change
What Project Drawdown can teach us
One of the things we repeatedly hear about the fight against climate change, is that transforming the economic model would be overly expensive. In fact many researches are currently suggesting this might not be the case.
Project Drawdown collects 100 solutions currently applicable with technologies already present, which not merely contribute to reducing emissions but would produce an undeniable economic impact. Costs would be far less than income and social benefits. Considering profits and savings and the value of required financing, costs become negligible and the return on the investment is substantially fast in most cases.
And all of this without even starting to consider the costs that would be suffered in the event of increasing natural disasters due to climate change, such as prolonged droughts, longer and stronger typhoons’ seasons, “water bombs”, and in any case more extreme and frequent meteorological incidents.
Are we still confident we should continue with our model of development, based on the denial of the laws of physics? A closed and isolated system, like Earth is in fact, has limited resources by definition and the intensive exploitation of these reserves causes irreversible exhaustion. The only way to limit this entropic process is to adopt sustainable development and use renewable source as much as possible.
Another thing to deny however, is the belief that everything depends on the Greats of the Earth. How often do we say:
What can we do? The Great Ones, the Leaders, should be doing something about it. Our contribution cannot move the needle.
Naturally we cannot deny it would be better to have great Leaders and expect them to take decisions on a global level. But we must equally say once and for all that the unique contribution each of us can give with his own life choices is much more important than you might think.
The 100 proposed solutions we can identify in the Project Drawdown are divided into seven categories, namely:
- Construction and Cities
- Power
- Food
- Land use
- Materials
- Transport
- Woman and girls
The most surprising thing is that out of the total 100 solutions, 17 fall under the Food category, and the three chief ones of this class can be found in the general top 10. In addition these 17 solutions concerning the sole Food topic would involve a reduction in greenhouse gases greater than any other sector, including Power and Transport.
The 2 main solutions proposed in the Food Category?
1 — Reduction of Food Waste
- 1/3 of all food grown or bred does not arrive on the plate to be eaten, but goes wasted before. This waste contributes about 8% of combined human-generated emissions.
- Ill individuals who desperately need nutrition cannot get it: more than 800 million desperate people in the world living below the poverty line, literally starving to death, while globally we waste 1/3 of the food chain’s resources.
- In areas of the world where there is greater poverty, this is due to the infrastructures poor development, the lack of refrigeration or storage facilities; therefore waste occurs inside the supply chain.
- In the most developed regions of the planet however, waste occurs later and is more a consumer responsibility. For example fruits must “look tempting” in the eyes of the consumer, and are therefore selected, discarding the “ugly” for purely aesthetic reasons. Supermarkets, having to avoid being left without merchandise, order too much and end up throwing away most of the excess stock.
- Ultimately inside the kitchens, while our grandmothers were masters of efficiency and could not afford to waste, having to live in the food shortage conditions of a typical post-war era, we have lost these customs by cradling ourselves in abundance, filling our fridges to capacity beyond measure and then having to throw away a lot, maybe only because the expiration date is passed for one day, or we have altogether overlooked what is it in our refrigerator, at the same time constantly buying new stuff.
- Wasting food not only causes emissions per se, but inadvertently contributes to an incredible loss of resources in terms of water, energy, land use, fertilizer, hours of work and financial capital expenditure.
- 35% of food wasted in developed economies, is thrown away by the final consumer, so each of us can really do something significant simply by devoting more attention to what we buy, purchasing fewer things at a time, and eating everything before doing shopping again.
2 — Plant Based Diet
- We do not even need talking about the ethical question of animals’ consumption, let’s just consider the purely environmental one. The most conservative estimates say that animal breeding is responsible for at least 15% of emissions. Including indirect releases due to things like deforestation, transport, water consumption and more, we arrive to up to 50% of all human-related emissions! More than energy sector and transport
- Overconsumption of protein is increasingly indicated as negative for health. Proteins necessary for our body to function properly are vastly inferior to those we eat on average. An adult needs about 50 a day, while in 2009, the average absorbed worldwide was 68. Besides, in the developed countries that consumption is significantly superior. In the United States and Canada, the average is 90 grams a day, with Europe following closely around 85 and China already at 75, growing every year as it develops economically. This consumption is directly linked to the occurring of various types of cancer, cardiovascular problems and so on.
- Is unnecessary to become vegetarian or vegan, but is certainly essential to reduce the consumption of meat. An excellent starting point is to pay attention to how many times a week we eat it, and then try to reduce its consumption in a conscious way.
- This would not only substantially reduce emissions, but would save literally millions of lives, while cutting healthcare costs. The calculations talk about Trillions of Dollars saved from now until 2050. Incredible figures, that should cause us to recognize how we must begin to consider ourselves responsible in the first person.
- A cow, which normally weights 50 kg at birth, will have reached approximately 600 when is ready for slaughter, but will have devoured around four to five tons of feed! 1/3 of the world’s cereal production is eaten up by farmed animals.
- To produce 1 single kg of beef takes 15,000 liters of water, while for example only 200 are needed for one of the tomatoes.
- Producing 1kg of chicken meat consumes 4,000 liters of water, while for example only 300 are needed for 1 kg of potato or cabbage.
- Reducing the consumption of meat as we have seen is healthy for us and the planet, but it is on top of that is a help for the most underprivileged and malnourished people of the world, because agricultural resources can be utilized differently, giving food to those who possess nothing instead of being used to stuff animals treated often in a shameful manner. It is incredible to think that 70% of agricultural land is operated to produce food used for feeding slaughter animals.
- Water can be given to those who die of thirst or do not enjoy access to drinking water, rather than used for the cultivation of plants needed to grow animals, or to the animals themselves.
- We may not possess an ethical conscience towards the creatures we eat and of course we could say being at the top of the food chain make us entitled to devour them, but are we at least to show some moral scruples for our fellow humans, other mortal beings who die of hunger and thirst?
What each of us does every day, is not only important, but it is incredibly significant.
As Jonathan Safran Foer puts it in his book