Third-Degree Burn
The world can’t continue to ignore agriculture’s role in climate crisis
By Mia MacDonald and Stephanie Feldstein
World leaders gathered in Madrid at the international climate summit, COP 25. Although the negotiations ended last week without requiring ambitious new commitments, the meeting did come at an urgent time: Just a few months ago, tens of thousands of fires destroyed more than 2 million acres of irreplaceable Amazon rainforest. It was a vision of the climate and extinction crisis unfolding in real time.
With the world burning, food and agriculture should have been one of the main courses at the climate talks. Many of the Amazon fires were set to clear the way for cattle grazing and feed crop production. Yet this critical topic stayed a side dish at best, with little attention served in the international climate negotiations and commitments.
It’s not hard to see why food and agriculture remain mostly off the table. Policies related to what we eat and how it’s produced are wrapped up with national identities, trade wars and political posturing.
From China’s strategic pork reserve to the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, from the U.S. government’s bailouts of farmers to Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro’s bizarre comments that only vegans care about the environment, there are examples everywhere.
When it comes to policies that encourage overproduction of meat and dairy, politicians aren’t just carelessly playing with our food. They’re gambling with our future food security and life on this planet.
Several studies indicate with increasing urgency that we cannot meet the ultimate Paris Agreement goal of keeping warming to 1.5°C unless we rein in agricultural emissions, about half of which come from livestock production. Further, the IPBES Assessment on Biodiversity and the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land, both released earlier this year, identified shifting to plant-forward diets as part of the solution.
If we don’t reduce meat and dairy consumption and production, we won’t be able to avoid catastrophic climate change or stop the extinction crisis. Yet demand for animal products is projected to increase by 70 percent by 2050.
To rapidly reduce the emissions and habitat loss caused by our food system, we need a multi-pronged approach that reallocates priorities within agriculture, curbs the sector’s planet-warming pollution, and engages researchers, civil society organizations, educational institutions, governments and other stakeholders in solutions.
That’s why our organizations, Brighter Green and the Center for Biological Diversity, together with 13 other groups, called on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat and the parties at COP25 to take urgent action to address the impacts of food and agriculture. Our call to action included five specific recommendations.
First, agencies must provide technical assistance for parties to integrate food and agriculture into the nationally determined contributions each country made in Paris and are scaling up for 2020. That assistance should be guided by the stark realities and opportunities for large-scale action laid out in the IPCC 1.5°C report, with a focus on addressing meat and dairy consumption and production.
Second, climate and development policies must promote sustainable diets and systems of food production to achieve accelerated emissions reductions and meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Third, governments must take bold steps to internalize the costs of livestock production, including to the global climate. Financial incentives and subsidies must be removed from livestock production and feed crops and redirected to sustainable agriculture.
Fourth, governments must provide a coordinated strategy across their agencies that recognizes the links among dietary patterns, environmental impact and food security to ensure that policies are aligned with public health and climate goals.
And last, since governments are often the largest buyers of food products — for schools, hospitals, government ministries and militaries, for instance — they should prioritize purchasing low-emissions foods (mainly vegetables, fruits, legumes and grains). By doing so, they can help transform national and global food supply chains and priorities.
Fixing our polluting agricultural sector requires tough choices that might seem unpalatable. But inaction’s consequences will be even tougher to swallow. We can’t afford to wait another five years to tackle the challenges of our broken food system. And as world leaders finalize their 2020 commitments in the lead-up to the climate summit next year in Glasgow, they’ll prove whether they have the stomach to do it.
Stephanie Feldstein is the population and sustainability director at Center for Biological Diversity.
Mia MacDonald is the executive director at Brighter Green, which works on issues at the intersection of the environment, animal and global sustainability.
