Individual action can include personal choices in many areas, such as diet, travel, household energy use, consumption of goods and services, and family size. Individuals can also engage in local and political advocacy around issues of climate change. People who wish to reduce their carbon footprint (particularly those in high income countries with high consumption lifestyles), can take "high-impact" actions, such as avoiding frequent flying and petrol fuelled cars, eating mainly a plant-based diet, having fewer children, using clothes and electrical products for longer, and electrifying homes. Avoiding meat and dairy foods has been called "the single biggest way" an individual can reduce their environmental impact.Excessive consumption is more to blame for climate change than population increase. High consumption lifestyles have a greater environmental impact, with the richest 10% of people emitting about half the total lifestyle emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_change
Avoiding meat and dairy foods has been called "the single biggest way" an individual can reduce their environmental impact. Exploring this some more—and this is a topic I've already explored to an extent—I find a number of headline-type lines that justify inspection.
• while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
• 96% of all land mammals are now livestock (60%) or humans (36%). [see; this is also the top pic source]
• even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.
• Just considering birds, 70% are poultry, 30% wild.
See [2] for detail.
I found a reference [yes I ought to find it again] that said something about CO2 equivalent volumes based on diet. If a meat-eating diet is 100%, a low meat diet might easily be half that and a vegan diet half again.
I'll get around to finding evidence to point at but right now we have an internet failure. Amusingly, the boss has just renegotiated our broadband deal, which included losing the landline forever (at last). That was the weekend (trading laws, who needs 'em in this century?); Monday morning, no landline (good), no internet (bad). Investigation by me says that the router inwards works as usual, but something is 'off' externally. I spend Monday discovering how little I can get done with no internet, including failing to message the boss
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So suppose for a moment that we halved the livestock. Basing my numbers on the chart to the right, that would apparently free up 40% of our currrent land for plant-based food, (which might move food production from 17% to around 55% of that land, so tripling this sort of food production) would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, reduce water and air pollution by 25% each and leave available a large amount of water for those plants. Mind, we might want to reconsider what we use all that land for.
I've written before that I think it is wrong to use high quality farmland for meat production. Conversely I think it is right to use low quality land for that purpose. I don't particularly wish to give up eggs or cheese but we have already switched to oat milk.
It would be better to replace the worst offenders in meat and dairy production with plant-based foods; [2] says this would deliver ⅔ of the benefits of removing all meat/dairy production. Perhaps we should be taxing the offending materials so as to encourage change. I could support that idea. (2017 article).
I read recently (evidence?) that, since we import quite a lot of meat, it would be silly to reduce our meat production instead of reducing our imports. that makes a lot of sense to me and there lies a political opportunity to do good. Instead of what it perceived as 'the usual', whatever decision makes the most gains for immediate cronies. Rant, rant.
In the UK [3] the utilised agricultural area is close to 9 million hectares, 9Mha. Of this 3.7 Mha is arable crops, of which around 80% is cereals and oilseed, with 0.14Mha used for horticultural crops. Of the 9Mha, the croppable area is 4.9Mha and permanent grassland 3.7Mha, leaving about 0.4Mha unidentified.
I am amazed how little land we use for fruit and vegetables. See DEFRA report 2020. Also DEFRA 2021. I found nothing newer. I see a clear need for a Land Use Commission and I'd go further, encouraging and supporting a lot more land management so as to increase UK food production of crops by a far larger factor. We import a lot and export little, when I think the opposite would be better. I'd like consensus on what is 'good' carbon sequestration (woodland, bogland, heath, permanent pasture, etc) so that we can recognise what is truly 'waste' land that we can therefore look to for building upon. We need to manage far better (than the mess we have) the use of brownfield sites and work harder at protecting greenfield sites, though we might look to trade space here by the previous idea, so that we try very hard not to build on what would (should) otherwise be good agricultural land. That might well mean that we generate a lot more parkland (with all the attached leisure uses, but not with money-spinning buildings and structures). The buzzword here is 'green infrastructure'. [4] refers.
I'm also disappointed that we have such poor grasp of what we use land for. For example, we have what I'd call a poor count of trees: How big is a tree to be counted as such? How much land does an individual tree occupy, so should we count area or count trees? If we count area then do we—as at the moment—miss out all parkland, scattered trees and domestic gardens?
While I am aware how hard farmers work, what we have is a grossly inefficient system. The WWF [5] provides data to support such a statement; we use 85% of our UK land use for livestock and their feed, to provide about half of our protein and a third of our calories consumed. If we halved the animals, we'd instantly move 20% of our cropped arable land from animal feed to human feed. Apparently we give a lot of wheat to chickens and pigs; we feed a third of the annual oat harvest to livestock and we import a lot of soy for the same purpose. The WWF reads like a biased author, unfortunately; I find this unhelpful if one is trying to cause people to form an opinion rather than shove an opinion down their throats. The full report reads only a little better; I like the idea/concept of low-opportunity cost feed for animals.
DJS June 2023
small additions in September.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_change
[4] https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/33168/documents/179645/default/
[5] https://www.wwf.org.uk/press-release/transform-uk-farmland-boost-food-resilience-tackle-nature-crisis and https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-06/future_of_feed_full_report.pdf
I am unimpressed by the current HMG commitments; DEFRA, Food Security Report 2021 (16 December 2021): https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/
• Maintaining our current self-sufficiency in food at just over 60%;
• Increasing woodland in England by one million acres (rubbish unit; 0.4Mha)
• Increasing new habitats for biodiversity by one million acres, 0.4Mha
• a 3% increase in England's national parks (1.8 million acres, 0.73 Mha)
• Building 300,000 new houses every year. (Failing badly on this; forecast to 2027 shows 200k might be the best that happens).
Animal populations in UK [6]
Cattle 5.1 million cattle and calves, of which 1.75M cows, dropping steadily by 1% a year.
Pigs, 4.1M (down from 8M in 1990s)
Sheep 15 million
Poultry 139 million
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