Cutting out meat and dairy is the best thing you can do for the planet

[NeoGreen]

https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/cutting-out-meat-and-dairy-best-thing-you-can-do-planet.html

Cutting out meat and dairy is the best thing you can do for the planet
Katherine Martinko
June 1, 2018

Huge new study reveals that going vegan offers far greater benefits than quitting flying or driving an electric car.

Meat and dairy, delicious though they may be, are terrible for the planet. We've known about this for a while, but now a new study has completed an even more in-depth analysis of their environmental impact. Conducted by researchers from the University of Oxford and published in the latest issue of Science, the study concludes that avoiding meat and dairy products is the single most effective way to minimize one's footprint on the world.

What makes this study different is its approach. The researchers worked from the ground up, assessing individual data from over 38,000 farms in 119 countries and analyzing 40 food products that represent 90 percent of what people eat worldwide. They "assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification)."

Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers
J. Poore, T. Nemecek

Science 01 Jun 2018:
Vol. 360, Issue 6392, pp. 987-992
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987

The global impacts of food production
Food is produced and processed by millions of farmers and intermediaries globally, with substantial associated environmental costs. Given the heterogeneity of producers, what is the best way to reduce food's environmental impacts? Poore and Nemecek consolidated data on the multiple environmental impacts of ∼38,000 farms producing 40 different agricultural goods around the world in a meta-analysis comparing various types of food production systems. The environmental cost of producing the same goods can be highly variable. However, this heterogeneity creates opportunities to target the small numbers of producers that have the most impact.

Abstract
Food’s environmental impacts are created by millions of diverse producers. To identify solutions that are effective under this heterogeneity, we consolidated data covering five environmental indicators; 38,700 farms; and 1600 processors, packaging types, and retailers. Impact can vary 50-fold among producers of the same product, creating substantial mitigation opportunities. However, mitigation is complicated by trade-offs, multiple ways for producers to achieve low impacts, and interactions throughout the supply chain. Producers have limits on how far they can reduce impacts. Most strikingly, impacts of the lowest-impact animal products typically exceed those of vegetable substitutes, providing new evidence for the importance of dietary change. Cumulatively, our findings support an approach where producers monitor their own impacts, flexibly meet environmental targets by choosing from multiple practices, and communicate their impacts to consumers.

[unblock]

1. Cows of course are notoriously bad. But what about seafood?

Land animals are inefficient because we could eat the vegetables directly, instead of feeding them to land animals first.

But does that logic work for seafood? Would harvesting plankton and sea plants be that much better than fish?

[NeoGreen]

2. Without even referencing the paper above and unless you grow your own...

...I would say 'yes', since we are already over-fishing the oceans as it is:


https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/overfishing

...Billions of people rely on fish for protein, and fishing is the principal livelihood for millions of people around the world. For centuries, our seas and oceans have been considered a limitless bounty of food. However, increasing fishing efforts over the last 50 years as well as unsustainable fishing practices are pushing many fish stocks to the point of collapse.

More than 30 percent of the world's fisheries have been pushed beyond their biological limits and are in need of strict management plans to restore them. Several important commercial fish populations (such as Atlantic bluefin tuna) have declined to the point where their survival as a species is threatened. Target fishing of top predators, such as tuna and groupers, is changing marine communities, which lead to an abundance of smaller marine species, such as sardines and anchovies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing

Overfishing has stripped many fisheries around the world of their stocks. As much as 85% of the world's fisheries may be over-exploited, depleted, fully exploited or in recovery from exploitation. Significant overfishing has been observed in pre-industrial times. In particular, the overfishing of the western Atlantic Ocean from the earliest days of European colonisation of the Americas has been well documented.

http://overfishing.org/

Why is overfishing a problem

In the first chapter we already discussed that globally fishing fleets are at least two to three times as large as needed to take present day catches of fish and other marine species. To explain why overfishing is a problem we first have to get an idea on the scale of the problem. This is best done by looking at some figures published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. 1 The FAO scientists publish a two yearly report (SOFIA) on the state of the world's fisheries and aquaculture. 2 The report is generally rather conservative regarding the acknowledging of problems but does show the key issue and trends. Due to the difficulty of aggregating and combining the data it can be stated that the SOFIA report is a number of years behind of the real situation.

52% of fish stocks are fully exploited
20% are moderately exploited
17% are overexploited
7% are depleted
1% is recovering from depletion

The above shows that over 25% of all the world's fish stocks are either overexploited or depleted. Another 52% is fully exploited, these are in imminent danger of overexploitation (maximum sustainable production level) and collapse. Thus a total of almost 80% of the world's fisheries are fully- to over-exploited, depleted, or in a state of collapse. Worldwide about 90% of the stocks of large predatory fish stocks are already gone. In the real world all this comes down to two serious problems.

1) We are losing species as well as entire ecosystems. As a result the overall ecological unity of our oceans are under stress and at risk of collapse.

2) We are in risk of losing a valuable food source many depend upon for social, economical or dietary reasons.

Plus, the paper above isn't just about the "feed stock", it is an evaluation of the environmental cost of the entire production stream.

[unblock]

3. but that's maybe not quite the same problem.

with land animals, we're essentially wasting water and land and inefficiently using land vegetables.

with water-dwelling animals, we're not really wasting water and land. we are inefficiently using sea vegetables in a biological sense, but maybe not in a practical sense, as we can't efficiently harvest water vegetables as readily as land vegetables. water animals do part of that job by bringing nutrients from distant and deep water vegetables to us.


i agree that over-fishing is a problem, but i think that has more to do with focusing on specific species than it does on animals vs. plants. that said, shifting our diet to include more vegetables (water-based or otherwise) would ease the situation regardless.

[NeoGreen]

4. Overfishing is overfishing...

...https://upload.democraticunderground.com/1127117695

The biomass of larger fish fell 36 per cent on fished reefs during 2005-15 and dropped 18 per cent in marine park zones allowing limited fishing, the researchers said. There was a small increase in targeted fish species in zones that barred fishing altogether.

[The_jackalope]

5. Not having children is the best thing you can do for the planet.

Kids that aren't born don't eat anything, use any fossil fuels, or cause any ecosystem/biosphere damage. Nor do their unborn kids, or their unborn grandchildren or great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren.

You get the picture. The damage stops with you.

The biosphere will recover more easily without your offspring in it.

[NickB79]

6. Realistically livestock should only be raised on marginal land

Dry prairie that once supported bison herds, or flocks of chickens and herds of pigs fed with food waste. Also, managed hunting of wild game where native predators can't do the job.

There is space for limited meat consumption, but only a fraction of what we currently eat.