Plant-Based Diets Could Help To Reduce Effects Of Dangerous Carbon Emissions

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Plant protein foods—like lentils, beans, and nuts—can provide vital nutrients using a small fraction of the land required to produce meat and dairy.

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By shifting to these foods, much of the remaining land could support ecosystems that absorb CO₂, according to a new study, that highlights places where changing what people grow and eat could free up space for ecosystems to regrow, offsetting our CO₂ emissions in the process.

The researchers analyzed and mapped areas where extensive production of animal-sourced food, which requires 83 percent of Earth’s agricultural land, suppresses native vegetation, including forests.

“The greatest potential for forest regrowth, and the climate benefits it entails, exists in high- and upper-middle-income countries, places where scaling back on land-hungry meat and dairy would have relatively minor impacts on food security,” says Matthew Hayek, the principal author of the study and an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies.

Burning fossil fuels for energy emits CO₂, warming the planet. When warming reaches 1.5 °C (2.7 °F) above pre-industrial levels, more severe impacts like droughts and sea-level rise are expected. Scientists describe how much fossil fuel we can burn before hitting that limit using the global “carbon budget.”

The findings also show that vegetation regrowth could remove as much as nine to 16 years of global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions if demand for meat were to drastically plummet in the coming decades along with its massive land requirements. That much CO₂ removal would effectively double Earth’s rapidly shrinking carbon budget.

“We can think of shifting our eating habits toward land-friendly diets as a supplement to shifting energy, rather than a substitute,” says Hayek. “Restoring native forests could buy some much-needed time for countries to transition their energy grids to renewable, fossil-free infrastructure.”

The research emphasizes that their findings are designed to assist locally tailored strategies for mitigating climate change. Although meat consumption in many countries today is excessive and continues to rise, raising animals remains critical in some places.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff