Eating meat wastes resources and fuels climate change

Eating meat wastes resources and fuels climate change

If you’re considering trading Sunday roasts for a meat-free existence, there is certainly evidence to suggest you’d help the environment in the process.

Focusing on the issue of climate change alone you’d be hard pushed to argue with the significance of the statistics - livestock production has been blamed for 18% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions - more than the entire transport sector... while a new report by the Worldwatch Institute puts the figure at 51%.

A growing population - by 2050, we’re predicted to number 9.1 billion - combined with increasing demand for livestock products means this issue won’t disappear soon.

If you read the recent Times interview with Lord Stern of Brentford, an authority on climate change and author of the Stern Review, you may have believed so, with Lord Stern quoted as saying meat is “a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases” and “a vegetarian diet is better.” Cue ecstatic advocates and furious farmers the nation over.

In a subsequent letter to the Times, Stern insisted he was not demanding that people become vegetarians but suggesting they should “be aware that the more meat that they eat, the higher the emissions of greenhouse gases that are implied by their diets.”

Su Taylor, spokesperson for the Vegetarian Society believes meat’s environmental impact is reason to quit. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in the personal impact we have on the environment,” she tells Sideways.

“A vegetarian diet avoids excessive carbon dioxide production and reduces methane and nitrous oxide production,” she adds. Not only that, “By feeding grain and vegetables directly to people - rather than livestock - we can increase the amount of food available to everyone.”

Then there’s the biodiversity impact... The livestock sector has a gargantuan “forest footprint” with huge swathes cleared to provide grazing or produce soy for feed. "Brazil's beef industry is booming to meet world demand, so cattle ranching there expands into rainforests where land is cheap and apparently limitless,” says Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme. “Biodiversity has little value to compare, so forests burn and this drives global warming. Burning forests for food is an evolutionary disaster and a climate catastrophe."

According to Friends of the Earth, 90% of the South American Atlantic Forest – home to some 20,000 plant species – has been destroyed, much of it for soy farming and if current trends continue, soy farming and cattle ranching alone will destroy 40% of the Amazon rainforest by 2050.

Supporters say that these factors only add to the list of reasons to “go veggie”. “The environmental arguments are strong, but many vegetarians simply believe that it is wrong to kill when there is no need to,” says Taylor.

“Others love and respect animals and want to minimize their suffering. Some are specifically opposed to intensive farming and choose vegetarianism because it sends a strong signal, guarantees you won’t be eating an animal reared in appalling conditions, and avoids the distress experienced by all animals slaughtered for their meat."