Why Meat Free Mondays are a must for food security and climate change

Lucy Bjorck, RSPB Senior Agriculture Policy Officer

Food security means different things to different people. To a subsistence farmer in a developing country it means producing enough food for their family for a year. For a low wage worker it means having cash to buy enough healthy food to feed the family. And for us middle class westerners – it probably means very little.

The relationship of food security with climate change is equally double edged. Agriculture is a major greenhouse gas (GHG) source, responsible for 17% to 32% of GHG emissions (the high end when including land use change, mostly deforestation which is devastating for biodiversity). Livestock production accounts, directly and indirectly, for a large proportion of these emissions[i].

And climate change also affects agriculture, expected to reduce global crop production by more than 10% by 2050[ii] and likely to reduce marine production as well[iii].

We need to feed more people, better, meet our climate targets and, at the same time, producing our food is getting harder. So how can we make sure that everyone has enough to eat, agricultural emissions go down, and we reduce farming’s impact on nature?

The initial response to worries about food security often looks for ways to produce more food and, for climate change, to make current methods more efficient. But whilst these routes may help a bit, they don’t address the root of the problem. Food security is about more than the total amount of food: it encompasses what we produce, how we produce it and how we access our food. The solutions are as much social and political as they are technical.

This is becoming more widely understood. Academic and advisor to Government, Professor Tim Benton, recently summed this up:

“... we’ll never grow our way into food security: the more food we produce, the more we’ll waste and over-consume, ...degrade the environment and issues of equity and access will remain. To solve these problems, we need to recognise local and planetary boundaries and grow food sustainably within them...”

  Andy Hay / RSPB

Lapwings can share farmland with lower-intensity
grazing

A Nature Climate Change article last month showed that closing ‘yield gaps’ (the difference between yields between best-practice agriculture and average yields in each agro-climatic zone) will not be enough to prevent further agricultural expansion and deliver emissions reductions unless we improve diets and reduce food waste.

This chimes with growing evidence and consensus about reducing the amount of meat we eat, if we are to stay within safe emission limits and nourish a growing global population. There are other benefits, too: a global transition to a low meat diet to meet health goals would lower our costs to reduce GHG emissions to meet a ‘safe’ 2°C global temperature rise by about 50% by 2050.

Farming livestock contributes 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions and covers a staggering 75% of all anthropogenic land use[iv].  Worldwide,  it's estimated that 30% of biodiversity loss is due to livestock yet equally, many of our priority species rely on livestock grazing. Many people eat more than they need for a healthy diet, creating a public health problem on a par with cigarette smoking, with annual costs of over £6 billion for the NHS, and rising to an expected cost to the economy of £50 billion annually by 2050.

So it’s clear that we need to make a change! You’ll no doubt have come across campaigns such as such as Meat Free Mondays and Part time carnivore encouraging us to eat less meat. Culturally of course, this is a difficult area and initiatives are needed not just from the ground up, but also by government to lead people towards healthier and more sustainable eating habits. There’s huge potential in this approach, for nature, for the economy and for our own lives – as well as our health, eating less meat helps our wallets too, freeing up cash which we may then choose to spend on more sustainably produced food and supporting wildlife friendly farmers.

At the RSPB we’re working, with others, to help deliver a new recipe for food, farming, nature and public health – click to the Square Meal web pages and let us know what you are going to do differently!