We Need To Change Our Farming & Eating Habits Or Face 'Catastrophic' Global Warming Says UN
Gwyn D'Mello Aug 08, 2019
When it comes to global warming, it's not just logging and pollution that's making things worse. It's also that our everyday lifestyles are wasteful.
Now the UN says if we don't get it together and change our diets, we could be in for catastrophic levels of global warming.
IMAGES COURTESY: REUTERS
This is the organisation's first comprehensive on the link between climate change and human land usage. It suggests that we need to change our diets to avoid food waste, and also adopt more sustainable means of farming, in order to tackle climate change.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that human activity has caused significant land degradation, deforestation and destruction of natural habitats. All of these effects together have resulted in a significant amount of carbon dioxide being released from the soil and into the atmosphere.
The report says that we need to adopt diets with more plant-based foods such as grains, nuts, fruit, and beans, as well as animal-based food produced with low greenhouse gas emissions.
Until now, the land has been responsible for absorbing a lot of carbon dioxide, thanks to photosynthesis in plants and the like. Cutting down all those trees, plus other climate-change effects like wildfires and desertification has resulted in all that land now releasing at least a third of all greenhouse gases into the air.
"This is a perfect storm. Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency," said Professor David Reay from the University of Edinburgh. "Crop yields are already being hit hard by climate change, staples like wheat, maize and rice are all at risk. The global web that is our food system means that impacts on farms thousands of miles away ripple right back to our own dinner plates."
"Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat."
The report indicates that the Earth's soil now holds only about one percent of the planet's total carbon, as opposed to the seven percent they earlier held. The solution to this problem, the UN says, is to immediately stop deforestation, and stop degrading the soil with exploitative farming methods.
We also need to diversify our farming to avoid leaching the soil of its nutrients. Farmers need to instead start relying on a mix of farming a mix of crop, as well as raising livestock, in order to allow the land to be more resilient to the effects of climate change.
For instance, that could mean mixing banana plantations with coffee. The former provides shade to the latter, and the mix of crops allows the farmer to be less reliant on a single crop. And the key to promoting this experts say is to first and foremost end subsidies on big single crops like corn and sugarcane.