Source: You think the energy problem is hard? Meet the food… | Canary Media
Slashing emissions from food and agriculture will be tough, but innovators are developing creative ways to do it, going way beyond Beyond Burgers.
21 March 2022
Canary Media’s Eating the Earth column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.
Imagine we quit using fossil fuels in our factories, vehicles and power plants. Imagine we stopped emitting greenhouse gases from our data servers, refrigerators and shopping centers. Imagine we decarbonized every aspect of human civilization…except our global food system.
From a climate perspective, we’d be way less screwed!
But as crazy as it might sound, we’d still be pretty screwed.
The food system produces one-third of our greenhouse emissions, about 18 gigatons annually. Even if we magically switched off all our other emissions tomorrow, we’d need to cut that close to zero by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. If we also wanted to feed a population expected to approach 10 billion by 2050, we’d need to make those drastic cuts while jacking up food production by more than 50 percent. That means we’d have to grow more than 7,000 trillion extra calories every year, the equivalent of 800 Olive Garden breadsticks for every human being alive today.
The World Resources Institute calculated that if current trends hold, growing all that extra food would require clearing at least 1.5 billion acres of forests, savannas and wetlands for new agricultural land, an area nearly twice the size of India. That wouldn’t exactly be consistent with the global commitments made at last year’s climate conference in Glasgow to stop all deforestation by 2030. It would mean the end of the Amazon and other natural ecosystems that we desperately need, not only to protect the earth’s biodiversity (and maybe help prevent future pandemics) but also to soak up carbon we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere.
So those current trends better not hold, or we’re super screwed.
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Somehow, we’ll have to figure out how to make more food with less land, so we don’t have to keep converting our forests into farms. We’ll need a smaller agricultural footprint with a smaller carbon footprint, and we’ll have to leave more room for nature’s footprint…
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