Tax meat, adopt more plant-based foods to save planet: UN

Major UN report delivers dietary advice with the aim of helping to protect the environment while at the same time feeding the world’s burgeoning billions.

Reducing overall meat consumption would substantially reduce the agricultural land-use footprint, the UN report says.

People must adopt a more plant-based diet to protect the environment, with taxes on meat helping to deliver the shift in habits needed, the United Nations has said.

Meat grown in a laboratory could also help to reduce the impact of livestock production, which accounts for 77 per cent of agricultural land globally, according to the UN’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report.

It says that an emissions tax on food could be transformative in reducing the greenhouse gases and loss of wildlife habitat linked to eating red meat.

The report quotes evidence that a tax could save one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent next year and deliver significant global health benefits “due to reduced consumption of meat”.

Beef generates at least six times the greenhouse gas emissions per kilo of protein as soya beans, previous research suggested. Red meat requires 28 times more land to produce than chicken and is one of the main drivers of deforestation in the Amazon.

The report, drawn up by 250 scientists and experts from more than 70 countries, says that food production needs to rise by 50 per cent to feed the projected nine to ten billion world population in 2050, up from 7.7 billion now.

It says: “Reducing overall meat consumption as well as providing alternatives to conventional livestock production (eg through plant-based meat alternatives) would substantially reduce the agricultural land-use footprint.”

Adopting a plant based diet would help save the world says the UN. Picture; iStock.

On lab-grown meat, the report says there is evidence that “production of cultured or in vitro meat requires smaller quantities of agricultural inputs and land compared with raising livestock”. It also calls for efforts to cut food waste, noting that a third of edible food produced globally is wasted.

The recommendations come in the sixth GEO report, which is published every five to seven years. It analyses the environmental threats facing the world, including loss of species, climate change and pollution of wildlife habitat by plastic and pesticides.

It concludes that “damage to the planet is so dire that people’s health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken”.

“Either we drastically scale up environmental protections, or cities and regions in Asia, the Middle East and Africa could see millions of premature deaths by mid-century,” it says, also warning that pollutants in our freshwater systems mean that antimicrobial resistance will become a significant cause of death by 2050 and that endocrine disrupters will affect male and female fertility, as well as children’s neurodevelopment.

Joyce Msuya, acting executive director of UN Environment, said: “Do we continue on our current path, which will lead to a bleak future for humankind, or do we pivot to a more sustainable development pathway? That is the choice our leaders must make, now.”

Ms Msuya, from Tanzania, replaced Erik Solheim, from Norway, last year who resigned amid allegations that his frequent flying, involving expenses claims of almost dollars 500,000 in two years, risked damaging the UN’s reputation.

The report calls for a global agreement to curb the flow of the eight million tonnes of plastic pollution going into oceans each year and says the world is not on track to meet the UN’s environmental targets for 2030.

The Times