Meat-Eaters Could Cause 'Dangerous Climate Change', Scientists Warn

British scientists have told meat-lovers they must swap hamburgers and steaks for a vegetable-rich diet in order to help prevent climate change.

Researchers at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities carried out a joint study exploring what would happen if the world continued to adopt a western-style diet based around “excessive consumption” of food, particularly “emission-intensive” meat and dairy products.

They found that if this trend continued, international targets on greenhouse gas emissions would be smashed by the food industry alone.

If the world’s population swells to almost 10 billion and “business as usual” prevails, the amount of land given over to growing crops would see a 42% increase by 2050. Fertilizer use would grow by 45% in the same period, they found. This could decimate the world’s most fragile environments, destroying 10 percent of the remaining rainforests.

This deforestation combined with the methane emitted by livestock would cause the amount of greenhouse gases produced by the food industry alone to grow by almost 80%.

“This is not a radical vegetarian argument; it is an argument about eating meat in sensible amounts as part of healthy, balanced diets,” said Professor Keith Richards of Cambridge University. “Managingthe demand better, for example by focusing on health education, would bring double benefits – maintaining healthy populations, and greatly reducing critical pressures on the environment.”

This is not what you should be eating (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The solution proposed is to cut back to a balanced diet and eat 85g portions of red meat and five eggs per week, as well as a portion of poultry each day. Society should also aim to slash its food waste by 50% and close the “yield gap” caused by inefficient farming.

Professor Pete Smith from the University of Aberdeen added: “Unless we make some serious changes in food consumption trends, we would have to completely de-carbonise the energy and industry sectors to stay within emissions budgets that avoid dangerous climate change. That is practically impossible – so, as well as encouraging sustainable agriculture, we need to re-think what we eat.”