Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Carbon footprint of your food

"'Eating local'...[although this] might make sense intuitively – after all, transport does lead to emissions – it is one of the most misguided pieces of advice... emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food and what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from. "Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%" 
A summary of some of the main global impacts: 
Food accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Half of the world’s habitable (ice-free and desert-free) land is used for agriculture.
70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture.
78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication (the pollution of waterways with nutrient-rich pollutants) is caused by agriculture.
94% of mammal biomass (excluding humans) is livestock. This means livestock outweigh wild mammals by a factor of 15-to-1.
Of the 28,000 species evaluated to be threatened with extinction on the IUCN Red List, agriculture and aquaculture is listed as a threat for 24,000 of them.
Bar chart of how much of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (26%); habitable land use (50%); freshwater withdrawals (70%); eutrophication (78%) and total mammal biomass (94%) results from food and agriculture.








1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Search This Blog

Followers