Beef and the Environment
Beef and the
Environment
·
Giving up beef will
reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert from
·
“The US and Europe alike are using so much of their land in
highly inefficient livestock farming systems, while so much good quality
cropland is being used to grow animal feeds rather than human food.”
·
Study shows red meat dwarfs others for environmental impact,
using 28 times more land and 11 times water for pork or chicken.
·
Beef
production results in five times more climate-warming emissions than chicken or
pork.
Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other
meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying
that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon
emissions than giving up their cars.
The heavy impact on the environment of meat
production was known but the research shows a new scale and scope of damage,
particularly for beef. The popular red meat requires 28 times more land to
produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times
more climate-warming emissions. When compared to staples like potatoes, wheat,
and rice, the impact of beef per calorie is even more extreme, requiring 160
times more land and producing 11 times more greenhouse gases.
Agriculture is a significant driver of global
warming and causes 15% of all emissions, half of which are from livestock.
Furthermore, the huge amounts of grain and water needed to raise cattle is a
concern to experts worried about feeding an extra 2 billion people by 2050. But
previous calls for people to eat
less meat in order to help the environment, or preserve grain
stocks, have been highly
controversial.
“The big story is just how dramatically impactful beef
is compared to all the others,” said Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College in New York state and who led the research on beef’s impact.
He said cutting subsidies for meat production would be the least controversial
way to reduce its consumption
“I would strongly hope that governments stay
out of people’s diet, but at the same time there are many government policies
that favour of the current diet in which animals feature too prominently,” he
said. “Remove the artificial support given to the livestock industry and rising
prices will do the rest. In that way you are having less government
intervention in people’s diet and not more.”
Eshel’s team
analysed how much land, water and nitrogen fertiliser was needed to raise beef
and compared this with poultry, pork, eggs and dairy produce. Beef had a far
greater impact than all the others because as ruminants, cattle make far less
efficient use of their feed. “Only a minute fraction of the food consumed by
cattle goes into the bloodstream, so the bulk of the energy is lost,” said
Eshel. Feeding cattle on grain rather than grass exacerbates this inefficiency,
although Eshel noted that even grass-fed cattle still have greater
environmental footprints than other animal produce. The footprint of lamb,
relatively rarely eaten in the US, was not considered in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, said the new work is based on national US data,
rather than farm-level studies, and provides a useful overview. “It captures
the big picture,” he said, adding that livestock is the key to the
sustainability of global agriculture.
“The biggest intervention people could make towards
reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat
significantly less red meat,” Benton said. “Another recent study implies the single biggest intervention to free up
calories that could be used to feed people would be not to use grains for beef
production in the US.” However, he said the subject was always controversial:
“This opens a real can of worms.”
Prof Mark Sutton, at the UK’s Centre for Ecology and
Hydrology, said:
“Governments should consider these messages carefully if they want to improve
overall production efficiency and reduce the environmental impacts. But the
message for the consumer is even stronger. Avoiding excessive meat consumption,
especially beef, is good for the environment.”
He said: “The US and Europe alike are using so much
of their land in highly inefficient livestock farming systems, while so much
good quality cropland is being used to grow animal feeds rather than human
food.”
Separately, a second study of
tens of thousands of British people’s daily eating habits shows that meat lovers’ diets cause double the
climate-warming emissions of
vegetarian diets.
The study of British
people’s diets was
conducted by University of Oxford scientists and found that meat-rich diets - defined
as more than 100g per day - resulted in 7.2kg of carbon dioxide emissions. In
contrast, both vegetarian and fish-eating diets caused about 3.8kg of CO2 per
day, while vegan diets produced only 2.9kg. The research analysed the food
eaten by 30,000 meat eaters, 16,000 vegetarians, 8,000 fish eaters and 2,000
vegans.
