Our individual consumption choices drive all the health or harm in the world, especially in what we chose to eat “far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car”.
A new study published in the journal Science, compiled a dataset of almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use, water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification).
Just one standout finding: livestock takes up 83% of global farmland, while providing just 18% of calories consumed. See Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way ‘to reduce your impact on earth:
Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.
The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.
The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.
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