Food Emissions Alone Would Blow the 1.5C Climate Target, Science Study Warns

Even if all fossil fuel emissions stopped immediately, greenhouse gases from the world's food system alone would make the 1.5C climate target impossible and threaten the 2C limit by the end of the century, a new study warns.

The international team, led by Dr. Michael Clark of the University of Oxford with Professor Jason Hill and Professor David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, publishes its findings in Science. Meeting 1.5C requires "rapid and ambitious changes to food systems" as well as cutting emissions from every other sector, the paper finds.

The authors model several fixes, including higher crop yields, less food waste and more efficient farming. The most effective is a switch toward more plant-rich diets, as the UC Santa Barbara release explains. In the Oxford Martin School press release, Dr. Clark said:

The good news is that there are many achievable ways to rapidly reduce food emissions if they are acted on quickly. These include both raising crop yields and reducing food loss and waste, but the most important is for individuals to shift towards predominantly plant-based diets.

That puts real climate power on every dinner plate.

It follows September's study finding that switching to plant-based diets could pull up to 547 billion tonnes of CO2 from the air, and the earlier Oxford finding that a global vegan diet could cut food emissions by 66%.

The climate fix we can all start on tonight.