Animal Agriculture & the Climate Crisis

In the midst of the climate crisis, it is now unarguable that animal agriculture is a top contributor to environmental breakdown.

A 2019 study on food production found that ‘meat, aquaculture, eggs, and dairy use ~83% of the world’s farmland and contribute 56 to 58% of food’s different emissions, despite providing only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories.’ Indeed, ‘livestock production contributes an estimated 14-30% of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions and is the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions’, the concentrations of which grew six times faster ‘[b]etween the advent of factory farming in the 1960s and 1999 . . . than they had over any previous forty-year period during the last two thousand years (Foer, 2019). Added to this, the meat industry is the single biggest cause of deforestation globally, pollutes water, causes desertification and contributes to biodiversity loss.

The world, however, is consuming meat like never before, and the global increase has prompted predictions of a potential 80% rise in meat-production greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, prompting scholars to ‘[voice] concerns that the impacts of the livestock sector alone may bring irreversible environmental changes regardless of any technological methods of addressing climate change'. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for 'major dietary change and reductions in meat production and consumption as one component in maintaining global anthropogenic warming under 2°C.’

Due to the scale of harm done by the meat industry, some experts believe that switching to a plant-based diet ‘is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth', however this insight has proved unpopular. A largescale opinion poll undertaken by the UN and Oxford University found that although ‘64% of participants believe that climate change is now a global emergency’ switching to a plant-based diet was ‘the least favoured of the 18 policy suggestions presented’ as mitigation strategies. Another study found that so unpopular are suggestions of excluding meat from diets that even environmental NGOs are ‘reluctant to promote the message . . . because they are aware that [it] is one that, with the exception of animal welfare NGOs, “their constituencies and other consumers will not want to hear.”’

Given the gravity of the statistics regarding animal agriculture it seems odd that converting to a plant-based diet is not being encouraged or adopted more than it is. Granted, many people are reducing their meat-intake to varying degrees, and whilst numbers have grown enormously in the past few years, those identifying as plant-based still only stood at 3.1% of the UK population at the start of 2026, and ‘a lack of willingness to adopt a more plant-based diet [is] still the dominant cultural pattern in most western societies (Graça, 2015).

Whilst British research has ‘suggested that beef consumption needs to decrease by 89% to stay within planetary boundaries,’ one study found that though the majority of respondents could consider a 20% reduction in meat consumption, the suggestion of 70% ‘was considered too drastic a shift from current practices.

It's difficult to imagine an individual saying that they'd attempt to recycle their plastic for a few days a week but couldn’t commit to more than that. A switch to a plant-based diet is simply eating some foodstuffs instead of others – it’s not eating less, it's just eating differently. There are plant-based alternatives to almost every product that comes from the bodies of animals. Yet vegans in western culture have historically been viewed as radicals; moral or health-obsessed extremists employing ‘extraordinary effort of will in order to go against the omnivorous grain of British dietary culture.'

Adjusting the way that we eat is one of the easiest and most significant changes we can make on an individual level to reduce our impact on the planet, and at a time when many feel helpless in the face of large corporate pollution and government inaction, this strategy could be viewed as an easy way for individuals to feel some sense of control.

There are many social and psychological reasons for resistance to adopting a plant-based diet, but it's difficult to comprehend how any of them stand up in people's minds when all data leads to the only alternative being the inevitable breakdown of our only liveable planet.

Sources

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Jonathan Safran Foer, We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 86.

Michael Barnes, ‘Why is Eating Meat Bad for the Environment?,’ Green Element, January 31, 2022, https://www.greenelement.co.uk/blog/why-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/.

João Graça, Maria Manuela Calheiros and Abílio Oliveira, ‘Attached to meat? (Un)Willingness and intentions to adopt a more plant-based diet,’ Appetite 95 (2015): 113-114, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.06.024.

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Oliver Morrison, ‘Plant-based diets is the ‘least favoured solution to climate change’, according to UN poll,’ Food Navigator, January 27, 2021, https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2021/01/27/Plant-based-diets-the-least-favoured-solution-to-climate-change-according-to-UN-poll#.

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