The change that has to come is huge and disturbing in its scale. And the cultural impacts will be profound.
In Brighton and Hove our carbon emissions are five to seven times what they should be. We are pledged to get them down by 80% within 25 years (and we don’t actually know if that will be enough). The humiliating collapse of the well-intentioned Scottish government proposal in this regard is just one indication of how hard the change will be.
One area where there is potential for rapid change is in the food system (what we eat; how we grow it, ship it, sell it and cook it; and how we frequently waste it). This accounts for over one third of all emissions. Then, within food system emissions, is the very significant component that results from our heavy meat-eating diet.
The big animals cause the biggest impact
But let’s cut to the quick. This is not a call for everyone to become vegans. There is in fact a lot of room for simple adjustment in our diets. The point is that far and away the worst impacts come from the meat of the big animals, notably methane emitting ruminants: cattle and sheep.
The emissions from the lamb production system are four times those of the chicken system and the emissions from beef production are more than twice those of lamb. If everyone in the world cut out beef and lamb (but we still kept dairy cows), we would nearly halve the land that is allocated to agriculture. We’d save 2 billion hectares, an area twice the size of the United States. That land could be put to more effective use, most pressingly soaking up carbon.
The reality is there are just too many livestock in the world. An incredible 80% of the world’s agricultural land is used for grazing livestock or producing feed for it. The total livestock population accounts for almost two-thirds of all mammal biomass. The world’s cattle weigh almost ten times as much as all wild mammals combined: wild mammals have now shrunk to only 4% of the biomass of the entire mammal kingdom.
But significantly reducing the world’s meat consumption will be a huge and painful cultural change. Cattle and sheep have been part of our lives since they were first domesticated over 9000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. As well as milk, meat and hides, they gave us our immunity to diseases. They have leading roles in many of our religions. They feature in many works of great art. Basically, we love our cows.
Dramatic change is overdue
That this is all going to have to change in our lifetime is so dramatic that lots of people don’t want to face it. Even the scientists and bureaucrats responsible are in denial. I emphasise this partly because there are special resonances for me. Both sides of my family were livestock farmers right back into the mists of time: one half in the north of Scotland, where I know my grandfather used to win regular prizes for his livestock (see image below), the other in the Isle of Man.
Try as I did to get away from all that, the pull of these animals eventually drew me back in. Over the years I worked, as a planner, with livestock farmers in several countries in the world: India, Thailand, Vietnam, Kenya, Uganda, Barbados, Eritrea. I witnessed the cultural entanglement that people have with livestock, especially with cattle.
I love them myself. I love seeing those beautiful hairy cows up on the downs. I love to have a reason to show pictures of them.
We need to reduce the numbers now
However, best estimates tell us right now that it’s either them or us.
The choice is either some 1.5 billion cattle and 1.3 billion sheep and a burning planet, or plausibly, say, a 70% reduction in numbers and much of the land converted to carbon sequestration. And it’s not just faraway places like the Brazilian rainforest that are involved but the land on our own back doors, the hallowed South Downs, for example.
As far back as 2018, the UK government’s advisory Committee on Climate Change reported that a 20-50% reduction in beef and lamb pasture in the UK could release 3-7 million hectares of grassland from the current 12 million. That grassland could instead grow forests that would help to soak up CO2. Of course, this will be an astonishing change, even though many informed environmental campaigners, like George Monbiot, think it is not nearly enough.
It’s not all doom and gloom
I don’t want to think that the news is all bad. New technology may genuinely have some helpful contribution but, with the time left, it is unlikely to be even half the story. Nonetheless, nearly every day, I find myself clinging onto the encouraging stories that come my way: Marks & Spencer investing £1m to change their source herds’ diet so that they produce less methane and reduce the carbon footprint of fresh milk by over 8%; tasty pork sausages being cultivated from pig cells and grown inside steel fermentation vessels; rising sales of vegan milk; higher yielding crops needing fewer chemical inputs while being more resistant to drought; the Wahaca restaurant chain printing carbon emissions by item on their menus so that it’s easy to see that mushroom tacos are ‘low carbon impact’ while the beef ones are ‘high’.
Some of these developments are unnerving, of course, but so is hearing politicians parrot how they will “keep 1.5 alive” when we’re already seeing it retreating at speed in the rear view mirror just as the latest season of monster heatwaves, wildfires and floods is getting started.
As the UK’s National Food Strategy report says “Change is never easy. But we cannot build a sustainable, healthy and fair food system by doing business as usual”. We need national leadership, of course, but change also has to get going at the local, community and household level.
In Brighton there is an incredible multitude of players but just to name a few: the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, with partners in the community organisations, statutory agencies, local businesses and individual residents; Brighton’s new non-partisan think tank Climate:Change which works with researchers, policymakers, local businesses and organisations to build consensus around more impactful policies; the two universities doing a range of pressing research; Brighton and Hove City Council, which, even in its current resource-starved plight, has officers with interesting and resourceful ideas.
The city’s own Food Strategy is being “refreshed” this year. All these bodies should be closely involved. One thing is obvious: if we want to be the progressive city that we say we are, we need to be chasing the decision-makers much harder, holding them to account every single day.
