Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet

by Hannah Ritchie

(7) Don’t rely on indoor farming I’m an enthusiast for new technology. So you’d think I’d be a zealot for any innovation that would let us grow food using much less land.

what we eat matters much more for our carbon footprint than how far it has travelled to reach us.

The transport part of the food chain only contributes around 5% to all of the greenhouse gas emissions from food. Most of our food’s emissions come from land-use change and emissions on the farm: the methane-burping cows; the emissions from fertilisers and manure; the release of carbon from the soils.

Flying is really expensive – companies won’t do it if they don’t have to. Instead, most international food trade comes by boat, and shipping is actually a pretty low-carbon way to travel. Transporting food by boat emits more than 50 times less CO2 than transporting it by plane.

This means foods that have a very short shelf life and would perish within a few days of harvesting, mostly fruits and vegetables that begin to rot very quickly: items such as asparagus, green beans and berries.

So avoid foods that have a very short shelf life and have travelled a long way (many labels have the country of ‘origin’ which helps with this).

A better rule is to eat foods that are grown where the conditions are optimal. That means you should buy tropical foods from tropical countries, cereals from countries that get very high yields, and meats where pasture lands are productive and forest doesn’t need to be chopped down for pastures to expand.

should we farm intensively over a smaller area, or should we farm organically, impacting biodiversity over a much larger area.42 The jury is still out.

Organic farmers still put nutrients on their crops – often in the form of manure. This means that, unfortunately, a lot of excess nutrients from manure are simply washed away into rivers and lakes where they cause algal blooms and other imbalances in our ecosystems.

I focus much more on what’s in the wrapper than whether there’s an approved label on it.

Plastic packaging – its impact is overhyped I get it: there’s no need for our food to be wrapped in five layers of plastic. Companies overdo it, often adding extra bits of packaging so that they can make products look pretty, or show their branding off.

The carbon footprint of the plastic packaging is tiny compared to the footprint of the food wrapped inside it. Just 4% of food’s emissions come from packaging.

The metrics we use to measure biodiversity are often tricky to grapple with, and many of us find ourselves tied up in terms that we’ve misinterpreted, including me.

The reshaping of the world’s mammals didn’t stop there. Before the onset of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, the biggest threat to animals was us hunting them directly. Once farming kicked off, it was the destruction of their habitats.

But this is not true. Around three-quarters of our crops depend on pollinators to some extent, but only one-third of the total food we produce does.17 –19 This is because many of our largest producing crops – staples such as wheat, maize and rice – are not dependent on them at all. These staple crops are pollinated by the wind.

The problem is not that many of the world’s beautiful species are going extinct. The problem is that they’re going extinct much more quickly than we would expect. So fast, in fact, that many think we’re heading for a mass extinction event. The Sixth Mass Extinction.

The bleakness of this picture depends on the assumption that species continue to go extinct as quickly as they have over the last few centuries. That is a massive assumption. One that is wrong. This mass extinction event is unlike any of the others because there is a handbrake. We are the handbrake.

Sure, these are a threat to some wildlife. But the biggest is often forgotten: how we feed ourselves. It has always been this way.

A thornier topic is how we view our relationship with wildlife: as part of a combined ecosystem where we all coexist, or separate systems where we have our ‘zones’ and other species have theirs. Human communities have always lived alongside animals. Rural and indigenous populations still do, with many playing an active role in conservation efforts.43 Indigenous lands occupy over a quarter of the world’s land surface, and overlap with around 40% of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes today.44 Expanding our protected areas from 16% to 50% will increase that even more.

But they do this, and are often oblivious to the things that they should really stress more about. You will recognise this list: they are the solutions in every other chapter of this book. We need to: Increase crop yields to reduce farming land Bring deforestation to an end Eat less meat, and reduce our need for livestock Improve our efficiency of, but don’t eliminate, chemical inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides Slow global climate change Stop plastic leaking into our oceans If we do all of these things, the world’s ecosystems can thrive again. Not instead of us, but alongside.

The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ – GPGP for short – is located halfway between Hawaii and California. The ocean currents form a gyre – the Pacific Vortex – where floating debris accumulates and is sucked towards the centre. Most of it is plastic. Some is more than 50 years old, a hydrocarbon time capsule for anyone stumbling across it.

Forty-four per cent of the world’s plastic goes towards packaging. The rest goes to buildings, textiles, transport and other consumer appliances. And when we look at plastic waste, not plastic use, packaging becomes even more dominant.

First, we care about how much plastic ends up as waste, then we care about where this waste goes. Some plastics are used for a very long time: years or even decades. Of the 8 billion tonnes the world has produced since 2015, a little less than a third is still in use.

If we could make chemical recycling much, much cheaper then we might be able to close the loop on making new plastics. That is currently way off, but maybe its time will come.

Academics tend to do this stuff out of curiosity, or for fun. But this study had practical consequences for Boyan and his team. They were grappling with engineering solutions not only to haul plastic out of the ocean, but to stop it getting in there in the first place.

To be clear, here I’m talking about plastic pollution: stopping plastic from leaking into our rivers and oceans where it harms wildlife. We don’t want to eliminate plastic use completely. We should keep it for essential uses. For the rest, we can find alternatives or cut back.

And as seen in previous chapters, you should be focusing much more on what you put in the bag than the bag itself. It will have a much bigger environmental impact.

that the world’s fish would be gone by

These gloomy prospects didn’t tally with what they were seeing on the ground – or, rather, in the sea. Sure, some of the world’s fish stocks were doing poorly. But others were not close to collapse. In fact, the sustainability of some was improving. If anything, it looked like there would be more fish in 2048, not less. Shortly after Worm’s study appeared, Science published several scientific rebuttals from other fisheries experts.

It will take a long time for whale populations to recover. But the world acted just in time to allow them to do so. The story could have ended very differently. Many species were hurtling towards extinction and we pulled on the handbrake, just in time.

The definition of ‘sustainability’ is completely different. So, too, is the end goal. When a fish stock is at its ‘maximum sustainable yield’ it’s around half of its original, pre-fishing level.15 So, what is sustainable to the second school is only half of what the first school considers sustainable. It’s a hard deadlock to break.

What’s changed is that human pressures are increasing the frequency and intensity of these events. We’re piling multiple threats on top of one another. We’re overfishing at the same time as we’re pouring sewage and fertilisers into coastal waters. To add insult to injury, we’re simultaneously ramping up the thermostat.

the biggest threat to the world’s coral reefs is a warming ocean. If countries are not reducing greenhouse gas emissions, they are trying to pull the wool over your eyes. The evidence is clear: to save the world’s coral reefs we need to stop climate change.

It’s better to look for fish with certification labels from organisations like the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC).

the US, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is the best.

Seafood such as flounder and lobster can have a very high footprint. If you want to eat seafood sustainably, I would avoid them.

Good choices would be farmed bivalves – clams, oysters, cockles, mussels, scallops – and small wild fish such as herrings and sardines.

So, as a consumer, I wouldn’t stress. As an innovator, policymaker or funder, you could help us get there even faster.

The problems we’re facing are tightly interconnected. The worry is that this gives us impossible trade-offs; we’ll be forced to prioritise one problem at the expense of another. But it isn’t the case; instead, these interdependencies mean we can solve a lot in one go. Move to renewable or nuclear energy to improve air pollution and climate change; eat less beef to improve climate, deforestation, land use, biodiversity and water pollution. Improve crop yields to benefit the climate and humans.

(1) Being an effective environmentalist might make you feel like a ‘bad’ one

In the past I’d brand it as ‘unscientific’ because it is unscientific. But ridicule has never been an effective way to drive change, and it’d make me a hypocrite because I haven’t totally rid myself of these feelings either.

That means that the societal image of sustainability needs to change. Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand.

He had to pretend to care because the public did.

Every time we buy something we’re sending a clear signal to the market – and those who bring products to the shelves – that this is what we care about. Every time we buy an electric vehicle, a solar grid connection or a plant-based burger, we’re telling innovators across the world that there is demand, shouting ‘We’re over here, come and serve us’.

(3) Stick with others pulling in the same direction

The arrows pointing in the same direction as me are those that are focused on building solutions that move us forward. Doomsayers are not interested in solutions. They have already given up.