In order to accommodate the 70 billion animals raised annually for human consumption, a third of the planet’s ice-free land surface, as well as nearly sixteen percent of global freshwater, is devoted to growing livestock. Livestock waste can also pass through the soil to groundwater, which may then contaminate nearby streams and rivers with nitrates and pathogens. Please note that as CO2 sequestration occurs on such a massive scale, we can expect the ocean to release its dissolved CO2 and the CO2 fertilization effect to decrease on land.
2.4 that between 1850 and 2011, cumulative CO2 emissions due to land use changes is second only to that from coal burning. From Fig. "Let me tell you how the carbon mass of animals is distributed," Chu said, referring to a recent study of biomass on earth.
[29] J. Hansen, P. Karecha, M. Sato, “Climate Forcing Growth Rates: Doubling Down On Our Faustian Bargain,” Environmental Research Letters, Vol 8, No 1, 2013. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/011006/meta, For author’s bio, please go to https://www.climatehealers.org/sailesh-rao, If you are a climate scientist and would like to have a public dialog on the contents of this position paper, please email us at chgroups@climatehealers.org.
Climate change is a threat to food security, water availability, and biodiversity worldwide, as well as a major cause of environmental disasters. We show that the annual methane emissions from animal agriculture alone cause more incremental global warming than the annual CO2 emissions from all fossil fuel sources combined. Livestock and Climate Change: What if the Key Actors in Climate Change were Pigs, Chickens and Cows, Assessing the Efficiency of Changes in Land Use for Mitigating Climate Change, Livestock’s Long Shadow, Environmental Issues and Options, IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse gas fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, IPCC Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land cover change, Improved attribution of climate forcing to emissions, Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles. In addition to making the clouds more reflective, it is also believed that the additional aerosols cause polluted clouds to last longer and reflect more sunlight than non-polluted clouds.”. If we only change our diets, but continue to purchase leather and other animal products, the industry is perfectly capable of raising animals just to produce the “other raw materials” and therefore, we would not be making much of a dent in our environmental impact. estimate the Land Use Change contribution prior to 1850 to be 343GtC or 1260 Gt CO2. [14] Smith P., M. Bustamante, H. Ahammad, H. Clark, H. Dong, E.A.
The exhaust can be classified as either greenhouse gases, which heat up the Earth’s atmosphere or aerosols, which are atmospheric particles that generally cool the Earth’s atmosphere.
The decline in the biomass of wild animals was also accelerating exponentially to be 58% from 1970 levels by 2012[18] and 60% by 2014[19]. In terms of dry matter biomass, our “livestock” or farmed animals consume more than 80% of the food that we extract from the planet in order to provide just 15% of the food (including “seafood”) that humans consume (see Fig. They have also unquestioningly accepted the United Nations (UN) Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)’s estimate)[2] that the lifecycle emissions of the animal agriculture industry sector is a mere 14.5% of global human-made greenhouse gas emissions, which justifies their urgency of reducing fossil fuel burning over dealing with the animal agriculture sector. By stretching methane’s impact over an entire century, the IPCC is diluting the global warming damage methane does on an annual basis, compared to C02. A.2. 3.1). In the latest report issued in August 2019[6], the IPCC is still using a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 28 for converting methane emissions to a CO2 equivalent (CO2e). 4.2, we see that we can now supply all the plant-based food and product requirements from the cropland output alone, freeing up the grazing land for reforestation and carbon sequestration. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Poore and Nemecek have calculated that plant-based foods provide 82% of the calories and 63% of the protein that we consume[21]. In Section 5, we will estimate the CO2 sequestration potential and the resultant climate mitigation that can occur with the global transition to a plant-based economy.
This shows that animal agriculture is indeed the leading cause of climate change. If global consumption of meat and dairy continues to grow at the current pace, the agriculture sector could consume about 70 percent of the allowable budget for all GHG emissions by mid-century. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Tackling climate change through livestock – A global assessment of emissions and mitigation opportunities. Since then, humans have combusted 365 GtC of carbon from the planet’s fossil reserves and displaced 164 GtC from vegetation and soil on land. The IPCC has encouraged the public to focus on fossil fuels rather than animal agriculture, even though methane causes more global warming than CO2 on an annual basis.
In its Fifth Assessment Report, the UN IPCC had calculated that the “Agriculture, Forestry and Land Use” (AFOLU) sector was responsible for 12 Gt CO2e or 24% of the global greenhouse gas emissions by industry sector, including indirect emissions from the electricity and heat production sector (see Fig. 2012. The UN FAO has a public partnership with the International Meat Secretariat, International Dairy Federation and the International Egg Producers Association, all industry promotion organizations. Holocene carbon emissions as a result of anthropogenic land cover change, The Holocene, Dec. 2010. We also illustrated the need to properly sequence the shutdown process for the killing machine (animal agriculture) and the burning machine (fossil fuel burning) so that we don’t increase the radiative forcing unnecessarily. 4. Moreover, approximately one gigaton of carbon dioxide equivalent worth of animal-based foods is wasted globally every year. Each ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere corresponds to 7.81 Gt CO2[28]. Since the land clearing in the industrial era was accompanied by fossil fuel burning, it raised the atmospheric CO2 levels, which spurred plant-growth due to more efficient photosynthesis. Nearly a third of biodiversity loss to date has been linked to animal agriculture.
At present, grazing lands store just 6% of the carbon per unit area when compared to the average for all land. The slides for the presentation can be found here. Therefore, even though the cleared land is storing very little carbon as we shall see below, the remaining forests now have a greater density of carbon than in pre-industrial times, which partially offsets the carbon lost due to land clearing. The burning of fossil fuels is currently the leading source of human-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In 1850, land use changes were the main source of human-made CO2 emissions, while at present, it is fossil fuels (see Fig. This 32.6 Gt CO2e can be split into actual emissions of 21.1 Gt CO2e plus avoided carbon sequestration of 11.5 Gt CO2e (see Table 4.1) on the land that would be freed up when animal agriculture is eliminated[3]. As far as the planet was concerned, our farmed animals were presenting the profile of a biomass that was triple the biomass of all the megafauna from 10K years ago.
Currently, 37% of the ice-free land area of the planet is used for animal grazing, but this grazing land only stores 2% of the carbon on land (see Fig A.2).
Livestock and greenhouse gas emissions: The importance of getting the numbers right, by Herrero et al. For reference, please see Table on Page 9 of the latest IPCC report[6]. This is reflected in the global land carbon stock map of Fig 3.2, which shows vast swathes of the planet with low carbon density corresponding to where human and farmed animal population is dense.
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