Nu har The Lancet skrivit om sambandet kött-klimatförändring:
Hela artikeln finns
här
Citat:
www.thelancet.com Published online September 13, 2007
Energy and Health 5
Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health
Key messages
• Greenhouse-gas emissions from the agriculture sector account for about 22% of
global total emissions; this contribution is similar to that of industry and greater than
that of transport. Livestock production (including transport of livestock and feed)
accounts for nearly 80% of the sector’s emissions
• Methane and nitrous oxide (which are both potent greenhouse gases and closely
associated with livestock production) contribute much more to this sector’s warming
eff ect than does carbon dioxide
• Halting the increase of greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture, especially
livestock production, should therefore be a top priority, because it could curb
warming fairly rapidly. However, livestock production is projected, on current trends,
to increase substantially over the next four decades, mainly in countries of low or
middle income
• Available technologies for reduction of emissions from livestock production, applied
universally at realistic costs, would reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions by less than
20%. We therefore advocate a contraction and convergence strategy to reduce
consumption of livestock products, mirroring the widely supported strategy
proposed for greenhouse-gas emissions in general. Contraction of consumption in
high-income countries per head would then defi ne the lower, common, ceiling to
which low-income and middle-income countries could also converge
• Assuming a 40% increase in global population by 2050 and no advance in livestock-
related greenhouse-gas reduction practices, global meat consumption would need to
fall to an average of 90 g per person per day just to stabilise emissions from this
sector. Such a decrease would require a substantial reduction of meat consumption in
industrialised countries and constrained growth in demand in developing countries,
especially of red meat from ruminant (methane-producing) animals
• A substantial contraction in meat consumption in high-income countries should
benefi t health, mainly by reducing the risk of ischaemic heart disease (especially
related to saturated fat in domesticated animal products), obesity, colorectal cancer,
and, perhaps, some other cancers. An increase in the consumption of animal products
in low-intake populations, towards the proposed global mean fi gure (convergence),
should also benefi t health
• The resultant gains in health and environmental sustainability should help to off set
any (initial) discomforts from restrictions on some popular foods and altered dietary
customs. Replacing ruminant red meat with meat from monogastric animals or
vegetarian-farmed fi sh would reduce methane production and lower the pressures on
wild fi sheries as sources of fi shmeal for aquaculture
• Climate change will, itself, aff ect food yields around the world unevenly. Although
some regions, mostly at mid-to-high latitude, could experience gains, many (eg, in
sub-Saharan Africa) are likely to be adversely aff ected, with impairment of both
nutrition and incomes. Compensating vulnerable populations for this and other
climate-mediated harm caused by other populations should be an important element
of global climate change policy
• Global population growth is continuing, although slowing. The eventual peak size is
not predetermined: it can be lowered by education, leadership, and wider
contraceptive availability. Slower population growth will help achieve the Millennium
Development Goals and will limit population size, climate change, and the
environmental eff ects of food production
Key indicators
Strategy for reduction of agriculture-related
greenhouse-gas emissions
National and international climate change policies all
accept a target that greenhouse-gas emissions from
agriculture in 2050 should be limited to no more than their
2005 levels. This acceptance recognises that this target
would necessitate a reduction in the projected globally
aggregated demand for animal products to an average (and
more evenly shared) per-head intake of, at most, 90 g meat
per day. Not more than 50 g of this should come from red
meat from ruminant animals. Acceptability of this policy
should be enhanced by the expected health gains, both for
current high-consuming populations, as their consumption
reduces, and for low-consuming populations, as their
consumption increases to an agreed, globally shared, but
modest, level. This proposal could well prove to be too
conservative, but has been formulated with the aim of
furthering debate in this largely overlooked area of climate-
change mitigation policy.
Short term: 2015
High-income countries should develop incentive structures
and educative measures to be introduced between now
and 2015, to initiate substantial contractions in the eff ects
of the production and consumption of animal products on
climate change. All countries should provide incentives for
research and development for technologies to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of food product, plus
incentives to fully deploy available mitigation technologies.
Medium term: 2030
Countries that were already above target in 2005 should be
half-way from 2005 baseline to the target of 90 g per day per
person. In countries in which consumption in 2005 was
rising rapidly, increases in consumption should have slowed
or halted, converging towards the target level. Countries
with low consumption in 2005 should be increasing levels of
consumption towards the target. All countries should have
in place incentive structures to induce widespread adoption
of mitigation techniques, together with research and
development towards greater mitigation at acceptable cost.
Long term: 2050
All countries should have met the minimum acceptable
emissions target. This target should have been achieved
mainly by constraining emissions from livestock
production. Restricting the intake of red meat from
ruminant animals to 50 g per person per day, along with
technical advances in livestock production, could reduce
/Aryan