Reduce emissions from the food sector in 7 years

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Maintaining hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C above pre-industrial levels, requires rapid reductions in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. However, while reducing emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil is essential to achieving this goal, other sources of emissions may impede its achievement. The importance of eliminating fossil fuels to mitigate climate change has long been maintained, but data shows that, if emissions from the food sector are not reduced, achieving climate goals will be impossible. Feeding humanity sustainably has become a global challenge that requires rapid and ambitious changes in food systems, as well as in all non-food sectors. What is the work being done to achieve this? Sustainable food To address global climate change, we need to rapidly reduce global GHG emissions. This often sparks a debate about where our attention should be: do we focus on energy or food? Fossil fuels or meat? But this is a false dichotomy. Without big changes in both, we have little chance of getting closer to our climate goals. We do not have the option of neglecting one or the other.

This is because a quarter to a third of global GHG emissions come from our food systems. These emissions come from various sources: deforestation and land use change; fertilizer and manure emissions; livestock methane; methane from rice production; energy use on the farm; supply chain emissions from food processing, refrigeration; and transportation. In this challenge to contribute to a sustainable Saudi Arabia Email List food system , that is, one that guarantees food security and nutrition for all, in a way that does not compromise the economic, social and environmental foundations for future generations, Sheila Voss, vice president of communications of the The Good Food Institute —which promotes more sustainable food alternatives to conventional ones— points out that it is working on a change in the food system that will allow its emissions to be reduced by half in the next seven years. In a decisive decade that begins in 2023, Sheila Voss suggests that the options to feed a population sustainably are becoming fewer and fewer, and therefore a transformation must be addressed through direct and indirect strategies.



Foods with radically lower emissions Voss' work proposes changing conventional meat, dairy and eggs for plant protein, as this radically reduces GHG emissions, while reducing the use of increasingly scarce resources, such as water. But, as the alternative protein industry has learned in recent years, providing consumers with carbon footprint information is not enough to convince them to change their diets. So how do we get consumers to adopt more sustainable diets? According to Voss, for these lower-carbon products to reach everyone's shopping basket and unlock their climate potential, they must "cost the same or less, taste the same or better, and be as accessible as traditional products." conventional. In response, the Good Food Institute works with businesses, governments, scientists, investors and other stakeholders to advance these three attributes. Of course, no one can say with certainty that this strategy will lead to significant decarbonization in the next seven years. But the climate mitigation potential of alternative proteins is on solid enough ground to fall into the category of transformative change, justifying continued work on it.