How will 9 billion or 10 billion people eat without destroying the environment?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 12, 2018 8:30:38 JST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How will 9 billion or 10 billion people eat without destroying the environment?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How will 9 billion or 10 billion people eat without destroying the environment?
> By Joel Achenbach
> Oct 10 2018
> <https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2018/10/10/how-will-or-billion-people-eat-without-destroying-environment/>
>
> The human population has reached 7.6 billion and could number 9 billion or 10 billion by midcentury. All those people 
> will need to eat. A sobering report published Wednesday in the journal Nature argues that a sustainable food system 
> that doesn’t ravage the environment is going to require dramatic reforms, including a radical change in dietary 
> habits.
>
> To be specific: Cheeseburgers are out, and fruits and veggies are in.
>
> The 23 authors of the report, hailing from Europe, the United States, Australia and Lebanon, reviewed the many moving 
> parts of the global food system and how they interact with the environment. The authors concluded that the current 
> methods of producing, distributing and consuming food aren’t environmentally sustainable and that damage to the 
> planet could make it less hospitable for human existence.
>
> A core message from the researchers is that efforts to keep climate change at an acceptable level won’t be successful 
> without a huge reduction in meat consumption.
>
> “Feeding humanity is possible. It’s just a question of whether we can do it in an environmentally responsible way,” 
> said Johan Rockström, an earth scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a 
> co-author of the study.
>
> The report comes on the heels of a warning from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that global 
> leaders need to take unprecedented action in the next decade to keep the planet’s average temperature from rising 
> more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
>
> Global warming has typically been linked to the burning of fossil fuels, but food production is a huge and 
> underappreciated factor, and the new report seeks to place food in the center of the conversation about how humanity 
> can create a sustainable future.
>
> “Everybody knows that energy has something to do with climate — we need to transform our energy system. There’s very 
> few people who realize that it’s just as, and maybe more, important to transform our food system,” said Katherine 
> Richardson, director of the Sustainable Science Center at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Richardson, who 
> was not part of the team producing the new study, added, “the food system is broken and needs to be fixed if we have 
> any hope of feeding 9 to 10 billion.”
>
> Already, half the planet’s ice-free land surface is devoted to livestock or the growing of feed for those animals, 
> Richardson said. That’s an area equal to North and South America combined, she said. Rain forests are steadily being 
> cleared for cropland. And the demand for food is increasing faster than the population: Rising income in China and 
> many other formerly impoverished countries brings with it a higher demand for meat and other forms of animal protein. 
> Some 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is already used in agriculture, and the demand for that water will 
> intensify.
>
> The Nature report, titled “Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits,” contends that, without 
> targeted changes, pressures on various environmental systems will increase 50 to 90 percent by 2050 compared with 
> 2010. There’s no simple solution, the authors write, but rather “a synergistic combination of measures” will be 
> needed to limit the environmental damage.
>
> One obvious measure is a change in diets. Researchers say meat production, which includes growing food specifically 
> to feed to livestock, is an environmentally inefficient way to generate calories for human consumption. Moreover, 
> ruminants such as cows are prodigious producers of methane as they digest food, and methane is a potent greenhouse 
> gas. The report says greenhouse-gas emissions from the global food system could be reduced significantly if people 
> reduce red-meat consumption and follow a diet built around fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes.
>
> To limit greenhouse-gas emissions, “we won’t get very far if we don’t seriously think about dietary changes to a more 
> plant-based diet,” said Marco Springmann, lead author of the report and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin 
> Program on the Future of Food.
>
> He said that what is good for the planet is good for the eater. For most people eating a typical Western diet, eating 
> less meat will generally mean better health.
>
> [snip]
>
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