IPCC's Land Report Showed We're Entering an Era of Damage Control

The IPCC has published a new report on climate and land.  The report includes chapters on land-climate interactions (land use changes are accelerating global warming, which is causing more extreme weather), desertification (deserts are expanding), land degradation (declining quality of soil, for example), and food security.  The latter is a particularly critical topic, given our dependence on food and water supplies for survival.

The report notes that humans struggle to efficiently manage our food supply. Between 25 and 30 percent of the food we produce worldwide is wasted.  This waste happens for different reasons in different regions – in developed countries, consumers throw out excess food, while in developing countries much of the waste is due to a lack of refrigeration as products go bad between producers and consumers.  And of course refrigeration requires energy, meaning that mitigating the latter problem will generate more greenhouse gas emissions.  The report estimates that food waste costs about $1 trillion per year and accounts for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from food systems.  Meanwhile, 2 billion humans are overweight or obese while nearly 1 billion are undernourished, highlighting the inefficiencies and inequities in our food distribution.

Overall, 23 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, forestry, and other land use.  Much of this is due to emissions of the more potent greenhouse gases methane (from cattle and rice farming, for example) and nitrous oxide (from nitrogen-fertilized agricultural soils).  The figure is comparable to the transportation sector (approximately 15 percent of total human greenhouse gas emissions) and electricity and heat (approximately 30 percent).  The report notes that diets heavier in meat and particularly beef adversely impact both greenhouse gas emissions and health outcomes.

Read more at IPCC's Land Report Showed We're Entering an Era of Damage Control