Impact Your World & Ours
Mediterranean Harvest For Life Can Help With Global Climate & Quality Of Life Issues
Global leaders are advocating we adopt eating styles with less meat to avert adverse climate change - and they espouse the Mediterranean style of eating in particular.
Concerned global leaders suggest urgent action is required to remedy the situation, and some are specifically recommending Mediterranean-style eating.
"We should think more about our high meat consumption," said Andreas Troge, head of Germany's Federal Environmental Agency. "I recommend a return to Sunday roasts and an orientation on Mediterranean eating habits," he said, adding that such a lifestyle change was good for one's health in addition to reducing our carbon footprint. "And it hardly means a reduction in quality of life."
Indeed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, Unit on Climate Change, "There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock."
According to Dr. Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, "the most attractive" near-term solution (to adverse climate change) is for everyone to simply "reduce meat consumption", a change, he says, that would have more impact than switching to a hybrid-energy car.
Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, the U.N. report warns.
Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation, and smarter production methods, including improved animal diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, are urgently needed, according to a recent United Nations report.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems, "senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said.
Cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation, according to the FAO report, Livestock's Long Shadow-Environmental Issues and Options, of which Mr. Steinfeld is the senior author. "The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level," it warns.
When emissions from land use and land use changes are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 per cent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure. And it accounts for respectively 37 per cent of all human-related methane (23 times as warming as CO2/carbon dioxide), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 per cent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.
The agency has also warned that meat consumption is set to double by the middle of the century. With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year, the report notes. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes, in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.
Modify Your Diet To Impact Your World And Ours
You can modify your diet to eat more of the animal products with the lowest carbon footprints and less of those products with the highest.
In light of the new U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization study, Kyoto Action recommends limiting daily consumption of animal products to between 11-16 oz or 300-500 grams, which is less than half the average American consumption. These quantities, however, are still above those in the Mediterranean diet for optimal health, according to the Kyoto action report. http://universite-integrale.blogspot.com/2009/04/kyoto-action-report-here-come-cows.html
