Sustainability experts conducting research at the University of Exeter have concluded that “We need to eat less meat and recycle our waste to rebalance the global carbon cycle and reduce our risk of dangerous levels of climate change.”

Echoing concerns aired by several conservation and food policy groups in recent years, researchers from Exeter suggest that the current evolution of dietary trends around the world towards more meat and dairy based diets risks overtaxing some of the Earth’s vital resources. However, the researchers claim that, by reversing unsustainable consumption patterns and changing lifestyle and farming choices to accommodate growing crops for bioenergy and carbon storage, there is still hope for averting “ecological disaster”.

Published Wednesday (20th June) in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, the research suggests that in order to feed a predicted population of 9.3 billion by 2050, moves need to be made away from eating meat, wasting less food and recycling more of what is wasted. The findings follow calls from the government’s own policy watchdog the Environmental Audit Committee, which last month called for more cohesion between education, healthcare, diet and environmental policy considerations, to put the UK on a genuinely sustainable path.  

Modelling different scenarios

The Exeter research team generated four different future scenarios, based on dietary preferences and agricultural efficiency up to 2050: ‘high-meat, low-efficiency’, ‘low-meat, low-efficiency’, ‘high-meat, high-efficiency’ and ‘low-meat, high-efficiency’. The different agricultural options looked at the type of livestock being produced, with beef being the least energy-efficient and pork being the most. They also looked at how intensively animals could be farmed and examined options for reducing food waste and making better use of manure to make livestock farming more efficient.

They used established mathematical models to forecast the effects of each scenario on atmospheric carbon dioxide. By 2050, a ‘high-meat, low-efficiency’ scenario would add 55 ppm of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, whereas a ‘low-meat, high-efficiency’ approach with carbon dioxide removal could remove 25 ppm. A 25 ppm reduction could mean we avoid exceeding the two-degree rise in global temperatures that is now widely accepted as a safe threshold for avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

Livestock production currently accounts for 78 per cent of all agricultural land use. The report’s authors concluded that through reducing consumption, and thereby land use, more land could be freed up for conservation and bio-energy purposes. They said that, in order to make a real difference, average global meat consumption would need to be brought down from 16.6 per cent to 15 per cent of average daily calorie intake. In the West, this would mean cutting meat consumption approximately in half.

However, their advocating intensive production will be sure to ruffle feathers as such intensive operations have been found to be deeply unpopular in Europe. Thousands of public objections have been submitted over planning proposals for high-tech large scale ‘mega-farms’ in the UK alone, which the developers promise will offer greater efficiency.

Nevertheless, the researchers argued that altering consumption in this way could provide more land to grow biofuel crops to address finite fossil fuel resources, though they warned that “Not doing this means we would lose our natural ecosystems and face increasingly dangerous levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

Although the use of biofuels is in itself a deeply controversial issue, with critics claiming the fuels are responsible for indirect land use change, rising food prices and atmospheric pollution, the Exeter researchers said, “Though less efficient as an energy source than fossil fuels, burning bioenergy crops while capturing the carbon contained within them, could be a powerful way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.”

Lead researcher Tom Powell of Geography at the University of Exeter elaborated on the Exeter study, “Our research clearly shows that recycling more and eating less meat could provide a key to rebalancing the global carbon cycle. Meat production involves significant energy losses: only around four per cent of crops grown for livestock turn into meat. By focusing on making agriculture more efficient and encouraging people to reduce the amount of meat they eat, we could keep global temperatures within the two degrees threshold.”

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