Government report recommends overhaul of land use and huge reductions in CO2 emission
The Department for Energy and Climate Change have published a report on their Global Calculator, a model which sets out what the ‘average lifestyle’ would need to be to meet climate change targets in 2050.
The project was based on a question:
“Is it physically possible to meet our climate targets and ensure everyone has good living standards by 2050?”
This is defined as all ten billion people in the world eating well, travelling more and living in more comfortable homes, whilst simultaneously ‘reducing emissions to a level consistent with a 50 per cent chance of 2°C warming’.
If this is to be achieved, the report says, the amount of CO2 emitted globally per unit of electricity needs to fall by at least 90 per cent by 2050. The proportion of people who heat their homes using other sources – electric or zero carbon – should rise to 25 to 50 per cent globally by 2050.
It was calculated that fossil fuel use must fall from being 82 per cent of our primary energy supply today to 40 per cent by 2050, with a sharp fall in coal demand required.
As well as transforming technology, there needs to be a change in how we use land resources, which will have a significant impact on people’s diets. In particular, the report concludes, we must make use of forests as a valuable carbon sink, and protect and expand them globally by five to 15 per cent.
In conjunction with this, the report recommends that people change their eating habits in order to maximise the land area required to produce food. It says that switching from beef consumption towards pork, poultry, vegetables and grains will significantly improve land use:
“Currently an area the size of a football pitch can be used to produce 250kg of beef, 1,000kg of poultry (both fed on grains and residues) or 15,000 of fruit and vegetables.
“In 2050, if everyone switched to the healthy diet as recommended by the World Health Organisation (2,100 calories on average, of which 160 calories is meat), this could save up to 15 GtCO2e in 205011 as the freed up land is used for forest or bioenergy.”
This would entail a big overhaul of lifestyle for many people, and worrying changes for farmers. It is for this reason that the report emphasises the importance of strong leadership from businesses, civil society and politicians, in the run up to the UN convention in December of this year.
26 Responses to “Diet is crucial in the fight to meet climate change targets”
CB
No. Coal comes from the ground. The carbon in coal hasn’t been in the biosphere for hundreds of millions of years.
I don’t know what study you’re pointing to, but I’m pretty sure they’re double-counting carbon.
You can burn a million tons of agricultural waste and produce a whole heap-load of carbon, right?
…but you can’t simply compare that to the carbon produced by fossil fuels because 100% of it came from the sky during the growing season. It’s 100% carbon neutral from year to year. The amount of carbon in the sky doesn’t change.
Do you understand now?
damon
I just can’t see anything changing enough in the time frame to make the difference to stop this two degrees of warming or whatever.
How are great cities like Bangkok to become so different so quickly.
How do you stop Colombo becoming as big as Bangkok or like a little Tokyo?
What should happen to the tuk tuks?
They’re probably terribly polluting, but people use them instead of owning cars and they employ large numbers of poor people.
ReduceGHGs
I’ll start and end with your first sentence.
The biosphere includes the ground.
Have a good one!
CB
The top layer, sure! Down where coal is buried, very little can survive. Coal is part of the long carbon cycle. Cows are part of the short carbon cycle.
It’s actually critically important to understand the difference between the short and long carbon cycles, because disrupting the long carbon cycle is actually why we find ourselves in the mess we’re in and interrupting the short carbon cycle is one of the few proven ways we have to actually fix the problem.
This guy is making coal from sky carbon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXMUmby8PpU
CB
The timeframe is hundreds of years. Truly catastrophic changes are coming much sooner than that, of course, but the system isn’t going to come back into balance for almost a thousand years… even if we disappeared tomorrow.
Educating women.
They’ll be replaced by cleaner, cheaper, more efficient electric tuk tuks.
None of that is outside the realm of possibility.