A Solution to the Problem of Global Warming: Part 1
Reduced Food Wastage
Climate change as we all know it is the spontaneous rise in global temperature leading to many issues such as forest fires delayed rainfall, change in wind currents, melting of the polar caps, etc. After reckoning these issues it’s quite natural to assume that Climate Change is an immense PROBLEM. But no, it’s the effect of global warming caused by excessive human intervention in the natural cycle. The stupendous increase in the measure of greenhouse gas emissions-the leading cause of global warming, is because of the increasing ignorance of varied production companies and industries, leading to a spike in the graph of all global issues against time. The leisure lifestyle adopted by people has led to the use of excessive resources.
Food is a global need, as a result, is the area that has the greatest impact on the resources consumed.
Also, the food wasted amounts to a large contribution towards global warming in extensive forms.
What is Project Drawdown?
According to the definition of Project Drawdown, reduced food waste signifies the minimizing of food loss and wastage from all stages of production, distribution, retail, and consumption. This particular solution reduces the current reported trends of food waste in varied regions.
According to different estimates, it’s quite suggestive that 30–40 % of all food produced is wasted worldwide. This wastage takes place during different stages of the supply chain. Consequently, when food is wasted, the energy in the form of labor, various resources, and money that was used in the subsequent production, processing, packaging, and transport are wasted. As a result, when the supply chain gets deeper and deeper the resources used also increases. If measures such as improvement of storage and transport systems, creating public awareness and changing consumer behavior, solutions as these could lead to major reductions in waste and carbon emissions as well.
To study the impact of reduced food waste a model was created outside Drawdown’s core model framework to project food consumption and wastage from 2020–2050. This became necessary as a result of the complex nature of estimation for a country as a whole which also applies to the regional scale. Estimations of food consumption and waste trends based on the reports of different commodities which come along the supply chain.
The global market for reduced food waste is defined as the overall demand for food, on the estimated kilocalories supplied per year for consumption by the world’s population.
Now the baseline food consumption is projected for all countries up to 2060 in kilocalories per capita per year, using data compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the year 2013. Total food loss and wastage are calculated according to regional estimates of waste generated at each supply chain stage, applied to aggregated country-level food demand by commodity type. Sadly current adoption of reduced food waste is considered to be zero percent.
Project Drawdown calculated the total reduction in food loss and wastage by weight (in million metric tons) by commodity type. It was assumed that reduced loss and wastage can be diverted to feed current and future undernourished populations. As a result tons of food was used as an input in the Project Drawdown Integrated Yield Model, which combines all agricultural production models to determine the required yield to meet the estimated food and bio-based product demand on a yearly basis. Results from all-demand solutions i.e. reduced food waste and plant-rich diet, determine the need for land conversion to cropland and grassland in order to meet future food demand. Emissions reductions associated with land conversion were applied to both reduced food waste and plant-rich diet according to the proportion of their contribution to the diverted food supply.
Conclusion :
Just to sum it all up, there are many ways and means to achieve the goal of reduced food wastage. In lower-income countries, improving infrastructure for storage, processing, and transportation is very crucial. Higher-income regions the major cause of wastage lies in the very ethics of the people. The consumer level is very much lenient with regards to the fact that there is something worth taking pains for. National policies can play a very important role in bringing about this change. Reducing food waste reduces the number of resources wasted and also the carbon emissions that happen when the food is decomposed.
