Animals
A Welcome Travel Ban
New Zealand has temporarily halted and is reviewing its live animal export policies in the wake of the human and animal welfare disaster caused by the sinking of the Gulf Livestock 1 last month. 42 crew and nearly 6,000 cows died in the tragedy. New Zealand has exported 65,000 cows already this year and typically exports millions of other animals annually including sheep, chickens, goats and deer. These animals — many of whom die on the journey — are forced to endure weeks of dangerous travel caused by rough seas, high density stocking and heat stress. To learn more, visit New Zealand animal charity Safe
Food
Ways to Reduce Suffering Without Suffering!
Among the many reasons why people are choosing to eat less meat these days are animal welfare concerns. If this is your hot button, there’s some excellent research-based guidance on the animal welfare impacts of different types of meat products e.g., chicken nuggets and ground beef. The charts — which also cover seafood and egg products — give consumers a menu of choices measured by high to low animal welfare impacts. It’s a way to finely tune one’s food choices by taking small steps rather than big ones. Check it out at faunalytics
the Climate Crisis
Greening Global Farm Subsidies
Government farm subsidies total more than $600 billion every year in countries that produce two-thirds of global agricultural output. But only 5% is tied to any conservation objective. A new report from the World Resources Institute shows ways to redirect farm subsidies to reduce GHG emissions and improve food security. The report recommends that subsidies be conditional on protecting forests and wild areas, improving environmental practices, reducing fertilizer use (and therefore emissions), and restoring marginal farm land as carbon sinks. It also recommends that payments be scaled based on performance.
speaking words of wisdom
“We are facing a crisis. One that has consequences for us all. It threatens our ability to feed ourselves, to control our climate. It even puts us at greater risk of pandemic diseases such as Covid-19.”
— Sir David Attenborough, “Extinction: The Facts”. BBC One documentary.
“The plant-based space is vital … I don’t think that it’s a short term fad that we’re trying to chase. We really believe that it’s the future of food.”
— Ryan Riddle, R&D Specialist of vegetarian meal solutions, Nestle, USA.
perspective
Food Shift and Land Swap Could Radically Reduce GHG Emissions
The latest report from the UN Convention on Biological Diversity highlights, yet again, how our destruction of nature is driven primarily by unsustainable farming, overfishing and the burning of fossil fuels, and that our invasion of natural habitats is helping unleash pandemics.
The biggest factor driving biodiversity loss on land is habitat destruction, mainly from farming. The report shows that nations have made almost no progress in meeting internationally agreed biodiversity improvement goals in the last decade. As a result, the report contains even more urgent calls to change our relationship with nature, including transforming how we produce and consume food, and use land. It also recommends we eat less meat and fish.
But, another new study offers hope. It shows that a food shift and land swap could create a massive carbon sink and buy us much needed time. Published in Nature Sustainability US scientists lay out a two-part plan that forms a roadmap to a better future. Their findings show that if we shift what we eat away from meat to plant-based foods, we would need significantly less land for food production. And if the resulting freed up land (from fewer livestock) was naturally reforested, vegetation regrowth could remove as much as nine to 16 years of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions. That much CO2 removal would nearly double Earth's rapidly shrinking carbon budget which we need to stay within to meet the Paris climate goals.
First, the food shift. Plant-based foods such as lentils, beans, and nuts, provide vital protein and nutrients using only a small fraction of the land required to produce meat and dairy. Animal agriculture uses 83% of all agricultural land globally and is a key driver of habitat destruction.
Second, the land swap. If demand for meat fell dramatically in the coming decades, the massive land requirements for livestock would be radically reduced and repurposed from pastures/cropland to forests which could support ecosystems that absorb CO2.
The study also identifies the regions where changing what people grow and eat would have the biggest impact.
"The greatest potential for forest regrowth, and the climate benefits it entails, exists in high- and upper-middle income countries, places where scaling back on land-hungry meat and dairy would have relatively minor impacts on food security," Prof. Matthew Hayek, of New York University and the principal author of the study said in an interview with phys.org.
"We can think of shifting our eating habits toward land-friendly diets as a supplement to shifting energy, rather than a substitute," says Hayek. "Restoring native forests could buy some much-needed time for countries to transition their energy grids to renewable, fossil-free infrastructure."
The scientists concentrated on areas where seeds could disperse naturally, growing and multiplying into dense, biodiverse forests that can remove and store CO2. This analysis “revealed over seven million square kilometres where forests would be wet enough to regrow and thrive naturally, collectively an area the size of Russia.”
This approach — restoring habitats and reducing meat and dairy consumption — can also help reduce the risk of another dire threat, one we are currently enduring.
"We now know that intact, functioning ecosystems and appropriate wildlife habitat ranges help reduce the risk of pandemics," said Helen Harwatt, study co-author and fellow at Harvard Law School. "Our research shows that there is potential for giving large areas of land back to wildlife. Restoring native ecosystems not only helps the climate; when coupled with reduced livestock populations, restoration reduces disease transmission from wildlife to pigs, chickens, and cows, and ultimately to humans."
The scientists also point out that their recommendations rely on nature, existing knowledge and practices to store carbon and do not require a future technological “moon shot” to reduce emissions.
"Restoring native vegetation on large tracts of low yield agricultural land is currently our safest option for removing CO2," Harwatt said. "There's no need to bet our future solely on technologies that are still unproven at larger scales."
Yet more evidence that transforming our food system and what we put on our plates can have a massive impact on reducing the threats of climate change and the spread of zoonotic diseases going forward.
on The horizon
Photo: Carbon Labels Canada
Harnessing Labels for the Health of the Planet
The lowly label – pored over by some, glanced at by others and ignored by many. And yet, it’s a powerful multi-purpose tool used by companies and industries to embed their messages. In a supermarket setting, they provide nutritional information, how the food was produced and processed e.g., fair trade, and marketing e.g., “natural”, “sustainable” – very often to allay consumer concerns. It remains an open question how often the claims are backed up by practices or for that matter by standards that are legally binding.
Nonetheless, reading a label provides a moment of reflection, education and a choice to align purchases with one’s values. Two young Canadians have decided to leverage this opportunity to advocate for consumer information about the carbon footprint of the products we buy. Stephani McPhee and Eli Lusty co-founded Carbon Labels Canada with the express purpose of advocating for carbon footprint labels on high volume products across Canada so that consumers can make an educated decision at the point of purchase.
“Every product purchased has an impact on the earth but the level of impact is hidden from consumers,” says Lusty. “This is a simple question of information access for consumers – a force that directs economic output.
“Research in countries and stores that have implemented carbon labelling indicate that consumers change their behaviour towards less polluting products when given the option. But as things stand currently [in Canada], there is no option.”
Stephani – who is studying urban planning and environmental sustainability at Dalhousie University, says their strategy is to raise consumer awareness and support for this type of information and bring about a change in public opinion that will put pressure on politicians to develop policy and legislation.
McPhee is realistic about the challenges they face. “It’s extremely difficult to fully look into the life cycle of a product. There isn’t quite enough tracking of where everything’s been and the processes on the farm, to calculate the carbon footprint.” This includes GHG emissions from fertilizers, manure, land conversion, livestock digestion, transportation, packaging and processing. Currently, food production is estimated to contribute 26% of global GHG emissions.
A second issue is to avoid green washing. To be effective, carbon labels need to be credible but there are hundreds of eco labels worldwide claiming that a third party has looked at the claims. “The easy solution is a certified government body that ensures consistency and validity,” says Stephani.
“We both try to be very aware of the embedded energy in the food we consume but this is an issue a lot of consumers have no idea about. Knowledge and understanding are hugely lacking in Canada. None of this is made transparent when you’re grocery shopping. The awareness factor is a critical first step for people to be able to go to a grocery store and then vote with their dollar. They’re consuming products and could be creating demand for products that are less energy-intensive, less beef for instance.
“We’ve seen research saying it’s very effective and we’ve seen evidence of it working elsewhere”. One study found that labels showing environmental information improved the carbon footprint of a person’s diet by about 5% compared with standard food labels.
Last month, restaurant chain Just Salad, became the first one in the US to display the carbon footprint of every item on its online menu. And in the UK, Quorn, a leading meat alternatives company, has started carbon labelling its products. Quorn has been working with The Carbon Trust (UK) to measure the carbon emissions of its operations since 2012.
Alexander Frantzen, founder and chief executive of Carbon Calories -- a company that produces carbon footprint reports aimed at consumers – told Forbes magazine that “Once a few brands begin to put carbon footprint labels on their products, we believe that consumers will use that information to inform their decisions; and will begin to demand it from other companies.”
Stephani and Eli are still in the research phase of their project but they’ll be reaching out to local and national organizations as well as decision-makers to bring the issue to the forefront and drive policy change.
They are passionate about helping consumers make more informed choices as people become increasingly concerned about the climate crisis and conscious of their own impact. By advocating for using labels to provide carbon emissions data to enable consumers to manage the environmental impact of their food choices, the lowly label can become another positive force for change.
phase out fast-growing chickens?
Breeding chickens to be as economically efficient as possible means raising them more quickly to be meatier. But a study by the University of Guelph shows this means more suffering for the animals including chronic joint pain. Global Animal Partnership — an animal welfare and labelling organization — is calling for the phasing out of fast-growing chickens. The study findings highlight that more needs to be done to alleviate animal cruelty on factory farms than just requiring better living conditions such as more space or access to the outdoors.
Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media.
Good news
Wind turbines can kill migratory birds but a recent study from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research appears to offer a solution. Researchers studied bird mortality rates at a Norwegian wind farm and then randomly selected four out of the 68 turbines for a new paint job. They discovered that painting a single wind turbine blade black could reduce bird fatalities by 72%. More study is needed but the researchers surmise that the black blade makes the turbine more visible. It is a promising finding as long as this innovation does not divert birds from important migratory routes.
New Jersey Senator and former candidate for the US Democratic presidential nomination Cory Booker, by-lined an article in The Guardian recently on the need to phase-out “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” — the industry’s euphemism for factory farms — under the headline: “A Savagely Broken Food System”. The article discusses Booker’s policy initiative The Farm System Reform Act — a proposal which would ban the construction of factory farms and support the owners of existing ones to close them down by 2040. His initiative was recently endorsed by fellow Democrat and also former presidential nominee candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
As consumers become more averse to buying leather products because of environmental and ethical concerns, innovators are creating “alternative leather” products from mushrooms. Fungus-derived leather technologies grow the root-like structure of mushrooms, called mycelium, to form a thick mat that can be treated to resemble leather. The process converts waste into useful materials and stores carbon in the growing fungus. The product looks and feels like animal leather, has similar durability, and prototypes are being used for purses, bags and shoes in the US and Italy.
data points
Photos: l. H1N1 swine flu virus, Centers for Disease Control. r. Jo-Anne McArthur, We Animals Media.
1. Covid-19 has jump-started awareness of zoonotic diseases and shone a spotlight on how pathogens cross over from wild/farmed animals to humans. Farm animals have played a crucial role as origins or intermediary hosts in numerous pandemics in the past. To better understand this important relationship, see this easy-to-read summary by The Guardian “Farm Animals and Pandemics: 9 Diseases That Changed The World.”
2. An estimated 70 billion land animals are raised for food globally each year, two-thirds of which are reared in intensive conditions. This gives rise to myriad threats including the exploitation of workers, air and water pollution, the use of vast amounts of arable land for animal feed which is driving deforestation, and concerns about food safety, antibiotic resistance and animal welfare. But, perhaps the most egregious is the link to disease. The UN has cited links to 200 different infections and the world is now all too aware of the costs of having them jump from animals to humans. medium.com
climate stories
These articles are adapted from The Climate Beat, the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic initiative committed to more and better climate coverage.
On the topic of a green stimulus, a joint project from InsideClimate News and The Nation explores how climate-smart Covid-19 stimulus spending could help transform cities and rural areas alike while also saving our collective climate future. One story looks at big cities in the US and abroad, and the other looks at rural areas and counties across the US. In both cases, the message from local leaders is clear: there are big, shovel-ready projects ready to go, if only national governments will get behind them.
Central banks tend to fly under journalists’ collective radars, but they’re among the most powerful independent forces in the world and could do a great deal to help curb climate change, writes Kate Mackenzie for Bloomberg Green. Free from the political constraints of governments, the banks could take bold action by favoring green and non-polluting industries. Instead, “by attempting to be ‘neutral,’” Mackenzie says, “they explicitly support the unsustainable status quo.”
On CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Anderson Cooper interviewed the eminent Sir David Attenborough, the BBC correspondent who has chronicled the natural world since 1954. Attenborough was once skeptical about man-made climate change, but his new film, “A Life on Our Planet,” due on Netflix on October 4, takes a different tack. “A crime has been committed” against the planet, Attenborough told Cooper. “Our planet is headed for disaster.”
here’s the above interview with david attenborough.
charting our path
Looking at the above chart is it any wonder that plant-based milks are the rock stars leading the shift away from animal-based foods e.g., they’ve already captures a 14% share of the US milk market. With an increasing number of consumers concerned about their health and that of the planet, switching to foods with a lower environmental impact is something we can all do to help fight the climate crisis.