The Herbivore Family
The Planet on Your Plate: Why a Global Shift to Plant-Based Eating is Vital for the Environment
Back in 2006, the United Nations issued a stark statement: the livestock sector is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale, from local to global. The report suggested that animal agriculture should be a major policy focus when dealing with land degradation, climate change, air pollution, water shortage, and the loss of biodiversity.
Four years later, the UN warned that a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty, and the worst impacts of climate change. Over a decade has passed since those warnings, yet the urgency has only grown. Here is what the data tells us about the relationship between our food systems and the health of our planet.
The Inefficiency of Animal Agriculture
The primary environmental issue with animal farming is its sheer inefficiency regarding land use. Globally, 26% of the world’s ice-free land surface is dedicated to grazing animals. In total, animal agriculture occupies 83% of all agricultural land, yet it provides less than 20% of the calories and less than 40% of the protein consumed globally.
The statistics for specific nations are equally staggering:
- In the UK: An estimated 85% of agricultural land is used for animals, covering almost 50% of the country’s entire landmass.
- In the US: 41% of the entire landmass is used for animal farming. By comparison, only 4% is used to grow plants directly for humans. Half of all US agricultural land is used specifically for beef production, despite beef making up only 3% of dietary calories.
Deforestation and Habitat Loss
This hunger for land makes animal farming the leading cause of rainforest deforestation and the single largest driver of habitat loss. Agriculture, which includes fish farming, is listed as a threat to 24,000 of the 28,000 species currently threatened with extinction.
In the Brazilian Amazon, cattle ranching is reportedly responsible for 80% of rainforest loss. Investigations have shown that fires in the Amazon are three times more common in areas with cattle ranching. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief regarding plant-based staples, about 75% of global soy production is used for animal feed. Only 6% of whole soybeans are used to produce foods like tofu and soy milk for human consumption.
The Climate Crisis and Emissions
A report from the University of Oxford stated that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the agriculture sector alone would make it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and difficult to avoid hitting two degrees.
Failure to curb these emissions risks the disappearance of coral reefs, extreme heatwaves, water scarcities, and food shortages that could displace hundreds of millions of people. It also threatens to raise sea levels, potentially flooding major cities such as Mumbai, Shanghai, Miami, and New York, and submerging South Pacific islands entirely.
Animal agriculture produces between 14.5% and 18% of total greenhouse gas emissions—more than the combined exhaust of all global transport. In the oceans, the fishing method of bottom trawling alone releases as much carbon emissions as the entire aviation industry. However, switching to a plant-based diet could reduce agricultural emissions by as much as 73% in high-income nations.
The Myth of “Eating Local” vs. Eating Plants
A common counter-argument is that eating local animal products is more sustainable than importing plant foods. The science suggests otherwise.
For beef, only 0.5% of emissions come from transportation. For lamb, it is only 2%. Even for imported plant foods like avocados, transportation accounts for only 8% of the total carbon footprint. For most food products, transportation accounts for less than 10% of emissions.
A study analyzing US households showed that food transport accounted for only 5% of diet-related emissions. Strikingly, substituting calories from red meat and dairy with plant-based alternatives for just one day a week would achieve the same carbon reduction as having a diet with zero food miles. Ultimately, what you eat matters far more than where it comes from.
Is Regenerative Beef the Answer?
Some argue that grazing cattle is beneficial because it sequesters carbon into the soil. However, meta-analyses indicate that while certain grazing management techniques can sequester carbon, this would at best offset only 20% to 60% of the emissions the animals produce.
Furthermore, soil reaches a carbon equilibrium after a few decades, meaning it stops sequestering carbon while the animals continue to emit greenhouse gases. As one lead researcher noted, grazing livestock are net contributors to the climate problem. Even the lowest-impact beef is responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and uses 36 times more land than plant proteins like peas.
The Opportunity for Restoration
Moving away from animal agriculture offers a massive opportunity for ecological restoration. Research into the US food system found that repurposing cropland used for animal feed to grow human-edible crops (fruits, vegetables, pulses) could feed an additional 350 million people.
Globally, if the world shifted to a plant-based diet, we could feed every mouth on the planet while reducing global farmland by more than 75%. This freed-up land would be equivalent to the size of China, Australia, the US, and the entire European Union combined.
Restoring this land to natural vegetation could remove roughly 8.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually—about 15% of the world’s total emissions. Additionally, this shift would reduce soil acidification and the eutrophication that causes oceanic dead zones by 50%.
A Call to Action
Current trends show that despite a population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, animal product consumption is rising. If this continues, we will need an additional 593 million hectares of land—the size of two Indias.
The lead author of the most comprehensive analysis ever conducted on the environmental impact of food stated that a vegan diet is “probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth.”
We face a critical question: How much more habitat must be destroyed, and how many species must go extinct before we change our food system? It has been over a decade since the UN called for a global shift to a plant-based diet. We do not have another decade to spare.
