Climate crisis: Can going vegan save the world?

As concern about environmental catastrophe deepens, Harry Cockburn tries to digest exactly how our diets may be making things worse and what action must be taken

More people in the west are turning their backs on meat (Getty)

The great project of our species has been agriculture. Since the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, humans have been hell-bent on farming our way to prosperity. And after a slow start, we seem to have become incredibly good at it.

Over the millennia, gradual improvements to our farming techniques created access to abundant food, thereby laying down the bedrock required for our first civilisations and societies to be founded and grow.

This progress was supercharged by the industrial revolution, and over the last two centuries, farming techniques have rapidly advanced, ultimately precipitating a whole new relationship between humans, livestock, food, the global economy, and the environment.

But just at the same moment when the food choices available to the average western consumer have never been broader, nor the comparative costs of eating so low, the dark, swelling underbelly of much of the food we eat – the toll it is taking on our planet – has become increasingly exposed, and it is not pretty.

Deforestation, lethal pesticide use, overfishing, monoculture farms devoid of wildlife, contagious animal diseases which pose risks to humans, soil degradation, and the endless invisible greenhouse gases released by livestock, are all among the issues consumers can grapple with if they have the inclination.

So in the decades of the late 20th and early 21st century, many people are increasingly developing new sets of behaviour around food.

A 2019 Ipsos Mori survey, commissioned for The Vegan Society, found that the number of vegans in Great Britain quadrupled between 2014 and 2019.

In 2019 there were around 600,000 vegans, or 1.16 per cent of the population. While this figure is low, it represents a rise from 150,000 vegans (0.25 per cent of the population) in 2014.

This year, 500,000 people around the world signed up for the Veganuary campaign, double the 2019 figure.

Meanwhile, people who describe themselves as vegetarian make up almost 15 per cent of the UK population, and pescatarians – who don’t eat meat, but do eat fish – made up 6 per cent, while those who said they eat everything accounted for 61 per cent of the population, according to the latest figures from Statista.

There are various factors at play, and attitudes and ability to how we approach our diets can be heavily influenced by forces such as wealth, habit, tradition, education, class, current affairs and political leaning.

While animal welfare has long been a serious issue for many people in food production, there are now new worries over the broader impacts on the environment and the global climate crisis due to the ways our food is produced, transported, packaged and sold.

Images of animals suffering in slaughterhouses have been part of campaigns against meat eating for many decades, but it is only relatively recently that concerns about the environment have also begun to lead people to the same conclusion.

An analysis by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation found meat and dairy account for 14.5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – the same as all cars, HGVs, aircraft, and shipping combined.

Why is this? Well, the world-changing impact of surging demand for meat and dairy is hard to overstate.

Of all the mammals on Earth, 96 per cent of them are now livestock. Meanwhile, since the dawn of humanity, our species has caused the loss of 83 per cent of wild animals, and around half of plants.

Meat production uses around 82 per cent of the world’s farmland and produces 60 per cent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.

In total, around 30 per cent of all land in the world which is ice-free is used to grow grains, fruits and vegetables that are directly fed to the chickens, pigs and cattle that we eventually eat.

On rugged terrains, such as the UK’s uplands, millions of sheep not only produce methane, but also eat the shoots of plants which prevent forests regenerating, and biodiversity returning. In other areas, deer have the same landscape-stripping effect.

Scientists have said avoiding meat and dairy products from your diet is the single best way an individual can cut down their own impact on the environment and help tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Landmark research by academics at Oxford University in 2018 found that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce an individual’s carbon footprint from food by up to 73 per cent.

If everyone stopped eating these foods overnight, then global farmland use could be reduced by 75 per cent – an area equivalent to the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined.

Not only would this result in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions, it would also free up wild land lost to agriculture, one of the primary causes for mass wildlife extinction.

But in a country where over 90 per cent of people eat animal products, a mass overnight transition to veganism is hardly realistic. Short of turning vegan, scientists are urging people to begin by reducing their meat and dairy consumption.

Jonathan Wells, professor of anthropology and paediatric nutrition, told The Independent: “Shifting to a much greater proportion of global dietary intake from plant foods is a key way to mitigate climate change and ecological degradation. Plant foods are more efficient per unit of land, and that would allow more land to be left wild.

“From my perspective, promoting an overall shift to plant-based diets at the population, and global, level is more important than whether individuals become fully vegan, or vegetarian, or simply stay an omnivore but consuming less animal-source foods.”

Transitioning away from meat and dairy is ultimately unavoidable, if the world is to meet climate targets, according to Dr Mike Clark, from Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, an expert on environmental, economic, and health impacts of food systems.

He said: “At a global scale, there is an abundance of evidence that suggests that consumption and production of meat and dairy need to reduce in order to promote health and meet environmental targets. This is particularly true in high-income economies like the UK, USA, Australia, EU with histories of high meat and dairy consumption.”

Dr Keren Papier, a Nutritional Epidemiologist also of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, also highlighted the role wealthy nations must play in overturning existing dietary habits to reduce the burden on the environment.

She told The Independent: “Current levels of meat and dairy consumption in high income countries are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and also put massive pressure on the environment and biodiversity through [for example] land use change and water pollution.

“Therefore substantial reduction of consumption in high income countries is essential for meeting global environmental and biodiversity targets.”

As well as the direct environmental benefits, cutting meat and dairy in the countries which have the highest consumption rates of these products would likely bring widespread health benefits.

Dr Clark said: “There’s lots of evidence that suggests that transitioning towards more plant-based diets would likely reduce rates of diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and certain cancers. This is particularly true in high meat-consuming regions such as the UK.

He added: “The main exception to this general trend is in lower-income and food insecure regions, where evidence suggests that increasing consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs would improve health outcomes.”

Professor Wells, whose book, The Metabolic Ghetto, discusses the numerous benefits of growing more of our own food, also spoke about what human diets may look like towards the end of the 21st century.

He said: “I hope future human diets will be more organic, more locally-produced, more plant-based. I would expect animal foods to be still part of the human diet, but I hope they would contribute a much smaller part of the overall intake, especially in high-income countries, and I hope their intake would occur much more equally among the world’s population, for those not fully vegan.”

While diet is, to an extent, about individual choice, governments and companies play decisive roles in shaping the production of foods, and perhaps here is where fundamental change is most urgently required.

The creation of policies to promote responsible, sustainable food production methods do not lie with consumers, but with governments, which have the power to do things on a grand scale over a short timeframe.

In 2019, scientists writing in the Lancet Planetary Health journal called for governments to implement a vast restoration of natural vegetation on land currently used for meat production. This, they said, was the “best option” for removing CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere.

They said high-income and middle-income countries wishing to meet the terms of the 2015 Paris climate deal must enact policies including declaring a timeframe for peak livestock; identifying the largest livestock emissions sources and setting reduction targets; measures to diversify food production, replacing livestock with sustainable foods that maximise public health benefits – mainly pulses (including beans, peas, and lentils), grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.

Going vegan or reducing meat and dairy won’t be enough to prevent climate catastrophe on its own, but it is a vital step in the right direction, and people will need support from the state, companies, and other organisations to achieve this.

To read more on how our species can respond to the climate crisis, read The Independent’s 14 ways to fight the climate crisis after publication of the IPCC’s ‘Code Red’ warning.