The New York Times recently asked a group of leading climate experts a big question—what’s the single best thing we can do for the planet—and their answers remind us that real change starts with rethinking how we live, and becoming part of a movement for change.
Climate change is just one symptom of a much deeper issue: our ecological overshoot. As Dr. William Rees from UBC explains in the Times’ article, we’re consuming far more than the Earth can regenerate, and producing more waste than it can absorb. Among other actions, the article discusses eating less meat as a powerful way to reduce our impact, because diets heavy in animal products are contributing in a major way to this overshoot.
Adding to the Times’ analysis (and using some more up to date numbers, as well), here is a brief overview of the impact of animal agriculture:
- Studies doing full life cycle analyses show that animal agriculture is responsible, worldwide, for approximately 20% of global warming emissions. And the harms go far beyond emissions.
- Raising animals for food uses more freshwater than any other human activity. On average, the water footprint of a plant-based diet (on average 400 gallons or 1514 L a day) is around one third of that of an omnivorous diet (on average 1300 gallons or 4921 L a day)1.
- Meanwhile, the industry is a major driver of deforestation, responsible for over 80% of Amazon clearing, and is the biggest contributor to aquatic dead zones like the one that forms each summer at the mouth of the Mississippi River2.
- Animal agriculture leads to substantial soil degradation, with vast tracts of land, primarily corn and soy fields used to grow animal feed, exhausted.
- On top of that, farmed animals in North America produce 130 times more diluted waste than all humans in North America combined, contributing significantly to air and water pollution3.
So what can we do? The NY Times article quotes climate change mitigation scientist Dr. Seth Wynes (University of Waterloo), who notes that switching to a plant-based diet broadly improves sustainability. We agree: we can reduce emissions, conserve water, preserve biodiversity, prevent pandemics, and avoid animal exploitation. In fact, a global shift to a plant-based diet could feed an additional 4 billion people using the same land we farm today. Our food system is not just environmentally destructive—it’s extremely wasteful. An average of about 81% of plant protein fed to animals is lost, meaning we could feed billions more people by growing plants directly for human consumption.
A careful study out of Carnegie-Mellon University has demonstrated that skipping meat just one day a week reduces emissions more than eating a fully local omnivorous diet every day. Doing so 7 days a week cuts global warming emissions equivalent to driving 13,000 fewer kilometers each year. It is therefore smart and responsible to transition to a plant-based diet. There are plenty of nutritious and delicious foods and products that make adopting a fully plant-based diet today completely satisfying and healthy.
At Earthsave Canada, we believe a sustainable future starts with conscious food choices. Earth Month was officially in April, but we invite you to treat every day as an Earth Day and every month as an Earth Month and take a step towards a more sustainable way of eating, adopting a plant-based diet, and to join us in building a better world.
Visit our resources page to learn more about sustainable food choices and how you can get involved.
- For a comparison per kilo per product see Calculating water footprints of animal, plant proteins. ↩︎
- For more on dead zones, see National Geographic’s Dead zones, explained https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/oceans/dead-zones/, and United States Environmental Protection Agency: Northern Gulf of Mexico Hypoxic Zone https://www.epa.gov/ms-htf/northern-gulf-mexico-hypoxic-zone ↩︎
- See also Leytern, A.B. et al. Methane emissions from dairy lagoons in the western United States. Methane emissions from dairy lagoons in the western United States. Journal of Dairy Science 100:6785-6803, 2017. ↩︎
