PS… Why did Cloudbridge decide to cook a vegetarian diet?

Cloudbridge (http://www.cloudbridge.org/) as I’ve mentioned before is an area of land that was once deforested and for a long time was used for agriculture. Founders, Jenny and Ian Giddy, then bought the land and have systematically worked to reforest the area to allow the natural habitat to regenerate. 

The Reserve’s mission is to preserve, reforest, and educate, so the students visiting this week had an intense programme to follow which was designed to help them develop an understanding of the importance of protecting and regenerating land to preserve biodiversity. Nobel as this idea is, and much as I believe the message was thoroughly and convincingly delivered to these kids, the big challenge is getting the students to understand that what they do at home also has an impact on what goes on in places such as Costa Rica. As I’m sure you know, one of the big ways in which we all have an impact on the world around is from what we eat.

Firstly, I’m not here to preach-Bro and I are meat-eaters so it would be a little hypocritical-however, we have made the decision to stop eating beef and tuna (tuna is another story), and we are trying to drastically reduce our meat consumption, and go veggie as much as possible. I would like you to understand our reasons, so that it’s at least on your radar.

So why do Cloudbridge (and we) care about this so much?

(Nb. it's worth mentioning that these are my own words, not Cloudbridge's)

Well we all know about the population crisis -7.3 million people and counting (Nb. when I was born in 1986, the figure was just shy of 5 billion…this scares me a lot...If you are interested, this is a really interesting (and petrifying!) website regarding world population numbers- http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ at the time of posting the population sat at 7,397,297,610). Current projections for future population numbers vary greatly (the UN currently predict it will be 9.6 billion by 2050), but regardless of the estimates, there is no doubt that our world is going to have to house a great many more people in the future than it currently does.

But what is perhaps even more significant than our rapidly expanding population and its ever demanding supply of mouths to feed, is that of these 7 billion people, the proportion of people who have access to varied meat diets (not to mention other resources) is expanding rapidly. The UN anticipate a significant increase in the demand livestock products and project this at an increase of about 70% between 2005 and 2050), driven by  a range of factors, most significantly a growing world population, rising affluence and increased urbanization*¹.

And why shouldn’t the rest of the world's population demand a better standard of living and a more varied diet? Us Brits have been living in an incredibly indulgent, meat-filled, consumerist world for a long time, so we can hardly resent others from wanting the same. The problem is, the world can’t sustain it. To quote George Monbiot “There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.”

The world’s population is increasing by approximately 1.2% per year, whereas livestock numbers are increasing at a staggering 2.4%*². In fact raising livestock apparently  uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land, and much of our cereal crops are used to feed them. Vast swathes of forest land is being cleared to provide for this increase in demand, and like here in Costa Rica, many existing farmers are switching to cattle farming as both the demand, and consequent price of beef is increasing, and there is therefore an increasing incentive for farmers to do so. The UN recently cited the meat industry as one of the biggest threats to the environment and contributes to 14.4% of human-related GHG emissions (that's a whopping...7.1 gigatonnes CO2 -eq per annum!!)*¹ so in a nutshell, things have got to change. There's not enough room in the world for a 7 billion full-time meat-eaters.

This is an interesting survey based on US food consumption, showing the relative carbon footprints of various diets. 

(Nb. Figures are per year).

As you can see, according to this study, the average American eating an average meat-eating diet produces 0.8tCO2e more than a vegetarian, and 0.6tCO2e more than a meat-eater who does not eat beef.

Why the difference?
So why does a meat-based diet have such a significant carbon footprint, and have so much more of an impact on the environment than a vegetarian diet? For one, as mentioned above, livestock take up approximately 75-80% of total anthropogenic land use*³ . In fact, a whopping 25% of the global land surface is currently taken up by grazing ruminants (eg cattle and sheep), contributing to exceptionally high rates of deforestation and land degradation. Bro and I just went on a hike through an area of Costa Rica near Monteverde which whilst 70 years ago would have been primary rainforest, is now barren grassland that has been so heavily degraded by grazing cattle that the quality of the soil is now so poor that it would struggle to be reforested, even if cattle were removed and efforts made to do so. In addition to this, all of the animals that we eat also require feed crops. The amount of land currently used to feed our livestock stands at around 34% of global cropland*⁴.

Now think back to your pyramids of biomass from school....Only approximately 10% of energy from each level in the food chain actually ends up as biomass in the next stage of the food chain. The rest is wasted in life processes (eg. movement, heat, excretion etc.).

So...

10,000 calories of wheat energy → 1000 calories of beef energy → 100 calories of human energy

However, if humans chose to eat the products from one trophic level further down the food chain, there would be approximately 10 times the amount of energy available to them: 

10,000 calories of wheat → 1000 calories of human energy

For want of a better diagram, this might give you an idea of what I mean...

...or perhaps this will help you to visualise it a little easier...

Source *5

So essentially this suggests that if the population was made up of vegetarians, then much less land would have to be used in order to support our diets. More people could be fed in a given area of land, and we could go at least some way towards combating food shortages....Some way. Indeed, a recent study from the Netherlands found that in theory "if everyone in the world switched to vegetarianism or veganism tomorrow, by 2050 carbon emissions related to the agriculture industry would have been reduced by 17 percent, methane emissions by 24 percent, and nitrous oxide emissions by 21 percent"*³. Quite powerful figures. It also found that up to 2,700 Mha of pasture and 100 Mha of cropland could be abandoned. If this land we then left to regrow, it could then go some way in reversing the impact on our environment.

So why beef?

Why is beef particularly bad? Well firstly its production uses 28 times more land than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions*⁶. Beef and cattle milk production account for the majority of carbon emissions, respectively contributing 41 and 20 percent of the livestock sector’s emissions whereas pig meat and poultry meat contribute 9 percent of emissions*¹. „ (Incidentally, feed production and processing and enteric fermentation from ruminants (essentially cow farts) represent 45 and 39 percent of sector emissions respectively).

Have a look at the graph below-

*1

So as you can see Beef and dairy cattle have a far more significant footprint than other meat-products, beef contributing 1827 million tonnes CO2e than pork. 

The graph below shows the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents per kcal of food for various food groups and as you can see the ruminants produce significantly higher emissions than the others. 

The main message I want to pass on is that I think we all need to start thinking about the impact our own diet has on the wider world, and to generally think a little more long-term and a little more globally. As I said before, I'm not trying to convince people to give up meat altogether (I of course haven't myself yet, although of course that would be great if we all could) - let's be realistic, let's make it simple, and make easy changes in small, bitesized chunks...then maybe one day soon that step into vegetarianism won't seem like such a big one for any of us!

Here are some ideas for what you could do to start reducing your impact today-

• Why not try having three meat-free days a week? Perhaps alternating a veggie day with non-veggie day?
• How about reducing your meat intake to only at the weekend? 
• Try some meat-alternatives, eg. substitute beef mince with quorn mince (I once tricked Brodie into thinking he was eating beef mince, when it was actually quorn and he didn't even notice!)
• Why not try cutting out the worst offenders, eg. beef? Or if you really can't at least try to limit how much of it you eat, and substitute it for other less intensive meats where possible (eg. swap beef mince for turkey mince/have a chicken roast rather than a lamb roast).
• Why not try only eating meat when you eat out?
• Try out some veggie recipes. You never know, you might love them and a veggie dish is usually a lot cheaper than a meaty one! Here are some good sites- http://allrecipes.com/recipes/87/everyday-cooking/vegetarian/ and http://www.myrecipes.com/vegetarian-recipes  (or better still, buy a veggie cookbook!).
• Have a bet with a friend to see who can last the longest without beef/meat etc. Nothing like a bit of competitiveness to get you into something!
• If you HAVE to eat beef, make sure you source locally produced beef (therefore with a  smaller transport carbon footprint), and where possible buy from sustainable, organic farms.
• Talk to people about why you are doing it! -Start the discussion, and raise the profile!

...I'm going to try too! :)

If you've got this far, thank you for taking the time to indulge me buy reading my waffle. Hopefully it's at least some food for thought anyway (see what I did there?!)....

(...And we haven't even started talking about the over-use of antibiotics in farm animals...but that's for another time!...) ;)

References

*1 http://www.fao.org/docrep/018/i3437e/i3437e.pdf  -Nb. this is a really interesting document if this topic interests you!
*2 http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf
*3 http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/banr/AnimalProductionMaterials/StehfestClimate.pdf

*4 Steinfeld H, Gerber P, Wassenaar T, Castel V, Rosales M, de Haan C (2006) Livestock’s long shadow. Environmental issues and options. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome
*5 http://schoolbag.info/biology/humans/33.html 
*6 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/21/giving-up-beef-reduce-carbon-footprint-more-than-cars