As people’s incomes rise, they tend to switch from “starchy staples” such as grains, potatoes and roots to meat and dairy products.”You would think there would be big cultural differences in these patterns across populations,” says Thomas Tomich, a food systems economist at the University of California, Davis. Several, However, it is surprising that this change is almost universal. How does an increase in income, especially the transition from poor to middle class, actually affect people’s consumption of livestock products? ”
However, cattle and dairy are particularly important to the climate debate because they are large sources of methane emissions. Ivanovich’s modeling shows that by 2030, ruminant meat alone could account for a third of his food consumption-related warming. Dairy will add another 19% and rice another 23%. Together, these three groups are responsible for three-quarters of the warming caused by the world’s food system.
However, there is a ray of hope. The research team believes that half of this warming could be avoided by improving our food system and diet. It starts with eating less cows and other ruminants. The less stomach to ferment, the better. New food technologies, such as plant-based meat imitations like the Impossible Burger, and meat grown from laboratory-grown cells, also known as cellular agriculture, can certainly help. Researchers are also experimenting with feed additives that reduce methane in cow burps.
In rice fields, switching between paddy and dry paddy fields, rather than leaving them flooded, can significantly reduce methane emissions for rice farmers. Researchers are also developing crops that self-fix nitrogen to reduce nitrous oxide emissions. (Legumes do this automatically, thanks to bacteria that live symbiotically in their roots.) One team created rice plants that grow biofilms that act as a home for nitrogen-fixing microbes, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers. has been reduced. Making such fertilizers is very energy intensive, so reducing our reliance on them will further reduce emissions.
But Ivanovich stresses that wealthy nations can never force economically developed countries to eat methane-conscious diets. milk, but for subsistence farmers it can be a working animal or currency. It’s really essential that you don’t make any changes to your diet without endorsing it,” she says.
Ivanovic’s 1 degree figure is an estimate, not a prophecy. For one thing, she cannot intricately model how new food and farming technologies will reduce emissions decades ahead. And environmental scientist Adrian Leip, lead author of her IPCC report on climate mitigation last year, says that while these technologies are promising, the question is when and how quickly people will adopt them. points out that it is not clear. “At some point, one of these technologies (I don’t know if it will be cellular agriculture or plant-based analogues) will be very cheap. , people start thinking: Why have I ever eaten animals?‘ said Leip, who was not involved in the new paper. “I don’t see a good reason, and I believe it has to be. no Occur. So if social norms start to change, it can go very quickly. ”
Further complicating matters is the additional feedback loop. As the food system warms the planet, crops will have to endure more heat stress and increasingly severe drought. “This is just a dynamic interplay of change in both directions,” he says Ivanovich. ”
But she offers a note of hope: when people stop producing methane, methane will decline rapidly.2 lasts for centuries. “If we cut emissions now, we can very quickly experience future warming reductions,” she says.
