Climate change | TableDebates

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Journal articles

Food systems cause a third of global GHG emissions

In 2015, 34% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were caused by the food system, according to this paper - a proportion that has fallen over time. Most of these emissions (71%) were from agriculture and land use or land use change, with the rest from other supply chain stages.

Enough: How your food choices will save the planet - book cover

Enough: How your food choices will save the planet

This book, based on the Planetary Health Diet produced by the EAT-Lancet Commission, discusses how dietary patterns influence health and the environment and make recommendations for which food groups to favour and which to avoid.

Animal, Vegetable, Junk - book cover

Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food

This book uses food as a lens to explore the history of human development. It explores the links between food and exploration, colonialism, slavery and capitalism, as well as the environmental implications of current industrialised food systems.

Emissions due to agriculture: FAOSTAT 2020 update

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has released the 2020 update of its dataset on agricultural emissions (accessible at FAOSTAT), with the newest figures covering the year 2018. Total agricultural emissions in 2018 were 9.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, of which 4 billion tonnes were from land use and land use change, and 3 billion tonnes of which were from livestock processes such as enteric fermentation and manure deposition. Agricultural and related land use emissions accounted for 17% of global emissions from all sectors.

LEAP

News and resources

Blog post: Meat, diet and climate in the media

In this blog post on the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People (LEAP) website, FCRN member James Painter summarises his recent research on media coverage of animal agriculture and its links to climate change, and lab-grown (or cultured) meat as an alternative to meat eating. The research shows that media coverage of animal agriculture tends to focus on consumer responsibility as opposed to the role of governments or large farms.

Foodsource

Impacts of climatic and environmental change on food systems

Food systems are central to human well-being. We rely on them for nourishment, employment, livelihoods, culture and more. Reliable access to sufficient food is a foundation of human health, and of social and political stability. While the impacts of food systems on the environment are great, changes to the climate and the wider environment — to which food systems contribute — also have major implications for the functioning of food systems and all that they support. Understanding this matters, because sustainable food systems in the future must not only maintain human well-being with fewer environmental impacts, but must also be able to cope to different environmental conditions to those experienced today.

Beef cattle grazing on a pasture. Photo by Jim via Unsplash.

Grazing livestock in a world of climate change: do they have a role?

In this blog post, Elin Röös continues the dialogue launched by a Sustainable Trust Fund event on the role of grazing livestock in climate change.Elin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences working for the Future Agriculture initiative at the same university, which is a strategic multidisciplinary research platform that addresses the sustainable use of natural resources with emphasis on agricultural production and food systems. Currently she is visiting the Food Group at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, working with future scenarios for protein production and consumption, and engaged in the FCRN network.