Knowing The Impact Of Diet On Reversing Climate Change And Saving The Planet

It might sound a little odd that the food we eat poses a massive impact on our planet. However, this clearly means that changing the type of food we eat can significantly reduce carbon emissions and promote sustainable farming. It is necessary to choose from several "climate-friendly" diets to achieve this. The most popular are the totally plant-based vegan diet, the vegetarian diet, which also permits eggs and dairy, and the pescetarian diet, which additionally allows seafood.

Agriculture takes half of the habitable land on Earth, destroys woodlands and different environments, and releases a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Meat and dairy explicitly represent around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Apart from this, there are also "flexitarian" diets, where 3/4 of meat and dairy is supplanted by plant-based food, or the Mediterranean diet, which permits moderate amounts of poultry, pork, sheep, and beef. However, deciding which diet to pick isn't as simple as you expect.

Above all, the climatarian diet is one new version created by the not-for-profit organization Climates Network. It says a climatarian diet is healthy, climate-friendly, and nature friendly. With this simple diet shift, people can save a ton of CO₂ equivalents per person per year.

Sounds perfect; however, the eating regimen actually allows meat and other high-emission food varieties like pork, poultry, fish, dairy items, and eggs. So this is only a more up-to-date rendition of the "climate carnivore" diet, except the followers, are urged to switch red meat (hamburger, sheep, pork, veal, and venison) as possible to different meats and fish.

So saving a lot of carbon dioxide is great, yet switching to vegetarianism or veganism can save much more. A western standard meat-based diet produces around 7.2 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per day, while a vegetarian diet produces 3.8 kg and a vegan diet 2.9 kg. So if the entire world went vegan, it would save almost 8 billion tons of CO₂e, while even a change to the Mediterranean diet would, in any case, save 3 billion tons. That is a saving of 20% - 60% of all food emissions, which are presently at 13.7 billion tons of CO₂e a year.

This graph indicates how much CO2e (in billions of tonnes, or GT) would be saved if the whole world switched to each diet.

To save our planet, we should also consider water and land use. Meat, for example, needs around 15,000 liters of water for each kilo.

Foods like avocados and almonds also have an immense water footprint, yet generally, a plant-based diet has about half the water consumption of a standard meat-based diet.

The reduced need for agricultural land would assist in concluding deforestation and assist with protecting biodiversity. The land could also be used to reforest and rewild large regions, turning it into a natural store of carbon dioxide.

Climatarian or flexitarian diets mean lower health risks and allow people to still exercise choice. Researchers have also suggested that moving to a global plant-based diet could reduce global mortality by up to 10% by 2050.

Thus, the ideal global diet to reduce habitat destruction, and greenhouse gas emissions, and help you live longer is the ultra-flexitarian diet. This would save no less than 5.5 billion tons of CO₂ equivalents each year (40% of all food emissions), decline global mortality by 10%, and forestall the slaughter of billions of innocent animals.

News Source: https://phys.org/news/2022-08-diet-planet-climatarian-flexitarian-vegetarian.html