Posts in category: Environment

Switching to a plant-based diet can help fight climate change, UN experts have said.

A major report on land use and climate change says the West’s high consumption of meat and dairy produce is fuelling global warming.

But scientists and officials stopped short of explicitly calling on everyone to become vegan or vegetarian.

People need to give up red meat to prevent catastrophic damage to the planet’s climate, a former government chief scientist has told Sky News.

Professor Sir David King, who is setting up a centre for climate repair at the University of Cambridge, said cattle and sheep produce so much greenhouse gas that diets must radically change to stop global warming.

I want to direct you to the 70% of the planet that was sidelined even in the sparse coverage of the new report: the seas. Here, life is collapsing even faster than on land. The main cause, the UN biodiversity report makes clear, is not plastic. It is not pollution, not climate breakdown, not even the acidification of the ocean. It is fishing.

“If cattle and dairy cows were a country, they would have more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire EU 28,” said Chu, who recently assumed the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses.

Each year, livestock produces billions of tonnes of excrement. It’s starting to poison the natural world. So what is to be dung?