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Repercussions of meat on mother nature

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Latest report from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most critical environmental problems, including global warming, air and water pollution, land degradation and loss of biodiversity.


Using a technique that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which includes 9 percent of all CO2 emissions, 37 percent of methane, and 65 percent of nitrous oxide.

Altogether, that’s more than the emissions caused by transportation. Thus, livestock are a major emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. As meat becomes a growing portion of human diet around the world, changing what we eat may be as hard as changing where we live!
“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” says Henning Steinfeld, senior author of the report, when the FAO findings were released in November.

Methane and nitrous oxide gases are particularly troubling, even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which continues to exist the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.

Methane could become a far more greater problem if the snowclad regions in northern latitudes defrost with rising temperatures, discharging the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. There’s no doubt that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products.

As the economic conditions stabilized in recent decades globally, the amount of meat consumed has been multiplied. Between 1970 and 2002, annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries increased from 11 kilograms to 29 kilograms. According to the FAO. (In developed countries, the comparable figures were 65 kilos and 80 kilos.) As population increased, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-times over that period. Beyond that, annual global meat production is predicted to be more than double from 229 million tons at the beginning of the decade to 465 million tons in 2050. This makes livestock the fastest growing sector of global agriculture.

Even if inexpensive, zero-emission fuels were available today, they would take ages to mount up and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon for the present. Similarly, unlike carbon dioxide which can survive in the air for more than a century, methane rotated out of the atmosphere in just eight years, so that lower methane emissions quickly translate to cooling of the earth.. as per reports from FAO.

Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet – including all food processing steps – results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. thus it is concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year.

However, the livestock sector’s potential contribution to solving environmental problems is equally large, and major improvements could be achieved at reasonable cost as per the reports.

Inorder to meet the two divergent demands for the animal food products and the environmental services we would require to reduce the GHG emissions by cutting down on the meat consumption.

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