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

by Hannah Ritchie

The world produces 3 billion tonnes of cereals every year. Less than half of this goes towards human food; 41% is fed to livestock, and 11% is used for industrial uses, like biofuels.

When we feed animals, some of the calories go towards building lean tissue and fat that we can eat later. But the majority disappears. How can this be? Where do these calories go? We want animals to gain weight because we get more meat in return. But even if they didn’t gain weight, we’d still need to feed them to keep them alive. Those calories are burned in normal day-to-day activities: roaming around, pecking, mooing, keeping all of their organs functioning. It’s no different from humans. In a very crude and cruel sense, the calories we feed animals just to keep them alive are a ‘waste’. How much ‘waste’ depends on the animal. The bigger the animal, the more food we need to feed it to keep it alive.

smaller animals are more calorie-efficient. Fish and chickens tend to be the most efficient, then pigs, then sheep, then cows.vi Unfortunately this means the opposite for animal welfare: you’d need to kill more of them to get the same amount of meat.

livestock are also pretty inefficient converters of protein. For pork, lamb and beef, more than 90% of the protein they eat from animal feed is lost. Put 100 grams of protein in, and you get just 10 grams back. Chicken is better, but we still only get 20% of the protein back in the form of meat.

Where meat and dairy products are good is that they are what we call a ‘complete’ protein source. They might lose a lot of the protein we feed them but what they do produce is higher quality, with a full spectrum of the essential amino acids we need for good health. Cereals have some but not all of these amino acids. If you were to eat only cereals, you would be protein-deficient.18 This is not the case with all plant-based products. Pulses such as peas, beans and soy have a very good amino acid profile. If someone has a mix of cereals and pulses in their diet, they can easily meet their protein requirements.

Meat has played an essential role in human diets for millennia. It’s wasteful but nutritious, not to mention tasty. However, if we’re to build a food system that feeds everyone without ruining the planet, we need to rethink our relationship with meat.

Food: the heart of the world’s sustainability problems Look at any of the world’s environmental problems and food lies close to the centre. It really is at the nexus of sustainability. As seen in Chapter 3, the food system is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. But even if we were to take climate change out of the picture, we would need to fix our food system to tackle our other environmental problems. Worried about pressures on freshwater supplies? Agriculture is responsible for around 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. In some tropical countries, more than 90% is used for farming.19 Worried about deforestation? As we have seen, take agriculture out of the picture and the problem almost disappears. Worried about biodiversity loss? Again, food production is the biggest pressure on the world’s wildlife.20 It always has been. From overhunting animals for food and claiming their habitats for farmland, to killing off ecosystems with pesticides and fertilisers, the largest threat to the world’s animals is human demand for food. Worried about water pollution? You guessed it: farming comes out on top.

how much land we would need to support our current population of 8 billion people using different foraging and farming regimes. Remember: the amount of habitable land on Earth – that’s all our ice- and desert-free land – is around 100 million km2, and we currently use half of it – 50 million km2 – for farming. To support 8 billion through hunting and foraging we would need 8,000 to 800,000 million km2 of viable land. That’s 100 to 10,000 times the amount of land we have on Earth. That’s also ignoring the inconvenient reality that we’d wipe out all mammals along the way. What about pastoralism? Small communities that rely on livestock? That is not much better than the most productive foraging societies. We’d need around 3,000 to 8,000 million km2. Or 10 Earths. How about a return to early, organic methods of farming? Could we all have our own little plot of land, roll up our sleeves and get back to how farming used to be? For shifting agriculture – the slash-and-burn style – we’d need between 80 and 800 million km2. Getting closer, but we still don’t have nearly enough land to live like that. For more traditional farming in one place we’d need between 8 and 80 million km2 which – at least towards the lower end – is much more realistic. But this would only work if everyone ate a plant-based diet so we could feed them efficiently on croplands. And we’d probably have to cut down many of our forests along the way. With modern farming we could feed 8 billion people on much less ...

Africa will need to grow a lot more food in the coming decades. In the next 30 years, it is expected to add another billion to its population, and then another billion in the 30 years after that. Researchers estimate that the amount of land it needs for crops could almost triple by 2050 if yields do not improve. Improving crop yields – especially across sub-Saharan Africa – needs to be part of the plan. If the region achieves this – if it manages to close its ‘yield gaps’ of what is biologically and technologically feasible – then it can feed itself without losing any forest or natural habitat at all. The good news is that we know how to do this. The technologies and investments that have already worked for so many countries – from fertilisers to improved seed varieties to irrigation – will become even more important with climate change.

Why aren’t we doing it?

Strangely, many environmentalists are strongly opposed to cross-breeding and genetic modification of crops even though they have been incredibly important for protecting ecosystems and habitats across the world. We need to overcome this opposition. If we want to feed 10 billion people without cutting down more forest, the environmental movement needs to cautiously embrace rather than shun the advances that will help us grow more from less.

Whether it’s greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, or water pollution,ix the hierarchy is nearly always the same: beef and lamb are the worst, followed by dairy, pork, chicken, then plant-based foods such as tofu, peas, beans and cereals. This is true whether we compare them in kilograms, calories or protein.

the biggest thing we can do is to eat less meat and dairy. If we want to really change things at scale we need lots of people to get on board. We would cut emissions, land use and water use by much more if half the population went meat-free two days a week than we would from increasing veganism by a few per cent. Most people aren’t going to change if they’re offered an all-or-nothing alternative. One of the worst ways to get someone to reduce their meat consumption is to tell them to go vegan. It just doesn’t work. We need to make it simple and enjoyable for people to cut back a bit.

If you’re a big beef eater then replacing some of your weekly intake with chicken or fish is the biggest thing you can do. In fact, that change makes much more of a difference than a chicken eater going vegetarian.

Every time you buy a new substitute product, you’re not just lowering your own carbon footprint, you’re helping to pull down the price for the rest of the world too.

blend beef with chicken, soy or other low-carbon protein sources, to build the hybrid burger. It would still taste like beef. It would have the texture of a normal beefburger. I mean, it still would be beef.

But which ‘milk’ is best? This is one of the most common questions I get asked. The short answer is: any of them. Take your pick. All of the plant-based alternatives have lower environmental impacts than cow’s milk.

Around one-third of the world’s food goes to waste.

Don’t live by ‘best before’ dates. Many supermarkets are now scrubbing these as people often confuse ‘best before’ with ‘use by’ and assume that this is its funeral date. In fact, it’s exactly as it describes: probably tastiest and freshest before that date, but still fine afterwards. We need to find better ways of

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).

What you eat matters much more than where it has come from

eating locally can actually be worse for the environment, especially when we opt to grow food where it’s not supposed to be grown. The UK is never going to be the place to grow cocoa beans or bananas. We could create a tropical environment in a greenhouse, but that would need lots of energy – far more than is needed to ship these foods from Africa or South America,

Importing Spanish lettuce to the UK during winter months reduces emissions three- to eight-fold.40 Tomatoes produced in greenhouses in Sweden use 10 times as much energy as importing tomatoes from Southern Europe when they are in season.

A better rule is to eat foods that are grown where the conditions are optimal.

Organic farming tends to promote better biodiversity – for bugs, in particular. If we were to compare one hectare of organic croplands and one hectare of conventional croplands, we’d probably find healthier ecosystems on the organic farm. But its big Achilles heel is that organic farming tends to give us lower crop yields, which (yes, you know where I’m going) means we need to use more land. That then introduces a trade-off and creates a divide in opinion of how best to preserve biodiversity: 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.

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. But a move to zero packaging would be a disaster. We’d end up with even more food waste, which would be worse for the environment.

the loss of some insects is inevitable. But by minimising the amount of farmland and by using fertilisers and pesticides more cautiously and efficiently, we can reduce these impacts. There are many solutions in the realm of biotechnology that help us use agrichemical inputs sensibly: we can engineer crops that are naturally more resistant to pests and disease so we need fewer pesticides; we can make more productive crops so that we need less land to grow our food; we can use scanning technologies to pinpoint exactly where we need to add fertilisers, and where we’re wasting our resources.

Ask people what the biggest threats to wildlife are, and many will answer something like ‘climate change’ or ‘plastics’. We are used to the images of a starving polar bear, a burning koala, or a bird with its beak trapped in the plastic rings from a six-pack. Sure, these are a threat to some wildlife. But the biggest is often forgotten: how we feed ourselves. It has always been this way. While new threats have emerged, the biggest threats today are the same as the ones in the past. Overhunting and agriculture have been responsible for 75% of all plant, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal extinctions since 1500.

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

The label that something is ‘recycled’ is a signal that it’s eco-friendly. Sure, it’s good to give things a second life. It’s certainly better than burning more oil from scratch to make a new version. But we can’t just recycle plastic over and over – at least when it comes to mechanical recycling, the type most countries rely on. When people recycle a plastic bottle they imagine it becomes another plastic bottle. It doesn’t. It gets degraded and is used for something lower quality. Most plastics can only be recycled once or twice, then they’re sent to landfill.

A global map of total plastic use per person would highlight Europe and North America. But the map of mismanaged plastic per person is the opposite. The rich countries are in the dark, while South America, Africa and Asia are brightly lit.

Eighty per cent of the ocean plastics came from the 1,656 rivers that emitted the most.v Eighty-one per cent of the plastic being emitted into the ocean comes from Asia.

When countries transition from low to middle income, consumers start to produce and use more plastic. They close in on the consumption habits of the rich. The problem is that the waste infrastructure to handle all this lags behind. Looking at the other continents, around 8% of plastics come from African rivers, 5% from South America, 5% from North America. Europe and Oceania combined contribute less than 1%.

every country had the waste-management systems that rich countries have, almost no plastic would end up in the ocean.

low on the priority list. The issue of waste is similar to that of air pollution in this sense. Eventually, people reach a stage of development where their priorities tip. In the early stages, people are willing to accept waste. It’s not nice, but it’s a trade-off they’ll accept in return for having the benefits those materials bring. Then, further down the line, people realise they want waste-free rivers and shorelines. They expect local councils to have a plan to collect and manage the city’s waste. When that transition happens, plastic stops leaking into the ocean. It’s as simple as that.

Low- to middle-income countries can accelerate this transition by investing in waste management now. Rich countries can support them by financing this effort.

In most countries, commercial fishing vessels need a permit. They often have quotas controlling how much fish they are allowed to catch (more on this in the next chapter). We can monitor their movements and sailing patterns using basic GPS technology. The solution, then, is straightforward: someone checks how much equipment a vessel has when it goes out to sea, and this is cross-checked with how much it has on its return. If ropes, nets and lines have been lost or abandoned in severe weather, or intentionally dumped overboard, fishermen get a hefty fine, a temporary ban or their licence taken away from them. We’d need some contingency for them accidentally losing small pieces of gear – if a massive fish rips a line right out of their hands it seems harsh to punish them for that. Or we could use the ‘carrot’ approach. Fishermen could be incentivised to bring plastic waste back to land. Not only their own, but any rubbish they come across on their voyage.

Why arent we doing it?

So far so boring: trade policies, more landfills and recycling centres, and someone who counts the number of nets on fishing vessels.

data shows us that the occasional plastic carrier bag is not that big a deal. In fact, in many ways, a single-use plastic bag is better than some alternatives. At least when it comes to the carbon footprint, it’s much lower than the rest. You’d need to use a paper bag several times, and a cotton one tens to hundreds of times to ‘break even’ with the plastic carrier.35, 36 This is also true for other environmental impacts such as water use, acidification, and the pollution of water with nutrients such as nitrogen. This doesn’t mean you should switch back to using single-use carrier bags: it just means you should make sure you’re reusing the other types of bags a lot. If you’re buying a new organic tote bag every second visit, you’re really making things worse. And as seen in previous chapters, you should be focusing much more on what you put in the bag than the bag itself.

Landfills can be bad if they’re not managed properly, and plenty in the world are not. Open dumps or surface landfills are not a good solution. Plastic and other waste can blow away, pollution can leak out of the bottom, and strong greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere. But a well-managed landfill, deep in the ground, can be a very effective environmental solution.

Most people think landfills are awful, but they could be effective storage sites for carbon, reducing the impacts of waste on climate change. When trash decomposes it emits CO2 and methane, an even stronger greenhouse gas. This is obviously bad for the climate. Well-managed landfills can slow or even halt this decomposition process by cutting off the oxygen supply. This stops CO2 or methane from being emitted: the carbon stays in the landfilled material instead. This applies to other products such as paper and wood too. Think about it in terms of trees. When we burn wood or leave it to decompose, it emits CO2. If we bury it instead, this carbon is ‘locked in’ and we have taken some CO2 out of the atmosphere. This is called a ‘carbon sink’.

Forever and ever in landfills? What happens to it? Problem for a future generation?

We extrapolate exploding population numbers and panic that they will never stop growing. At least, until they crash. We see rising CO2 emissions and assume that they’ll just keep rising. Fertilisers, coal, pesticides, air pollution: we’ll just produce more and more. If you’re sceptical that things can change, then this is a natural position to fall into. But there’s no scientific basis for this assumption. In fact, for most of our environmental problems, there are clear signs that it isn’t that way any more. We can, and are, course-correcting.

Around 11% of the 90 million tonnes of wild fish that we catch each year is used as feed for aquaculture. Aquaculture then gives us about 100 million tonnes of seafood. Not a bad deal.

we use fewer wild fish for feed than we did a few decades ago, and produce more than five times as much from aquaculture. Fish farming is an innovation that has saved many fish populations across the world.

The bounce-back of iconic fish species across Europe and North America was only possible because we monitored them closely. Unfortunately, not every country invests in this level of monitoring. We have large data gaps across many parts of Asia, Africa and South America.

it’s very difficult to keep fish stocks in balance without this information. They need this data to know how much they can fish, and when. They need it to set quotas to make sure there is a fair distribution between fishermen. Ignorance might be bliss in the short term, but not for long. There’s actually a pretty selfish reason to monitor fish populations closely. Countries need to if they want to have a profitable fishing industry in the medium term. As we saw from examples in Canada and the UK, they will have to work harder and harder to get a good catch. Fishing becomes less profitable. Short-term greed will come back to bite and sink them later.

things are awful (30% are still overfished, and the EU missed its target); things are much better (30% is much less than the 78% it used to be); things can be improved.

most of the popular fish we eat – tuna, salmon, cod, trout, herring – were the most climate-friendly types of meat. Fish are not quite as good as plant-based protein sources, but they can still be a fairly low-carbon choice. Most fish perform well on other environmental metrics too. They’re nearly all better than chicken. Be careful, though. There are a few delicacies where you could be hit with a high footprint, as well as a hefty price tag. Seafood such as flounder and lobster can have a very high footprint.

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.

The fact that our intuitions are so ‘off’ is a problem. At a time when the world needs to eat less meat, we’ve seen a pushback against meat-substitute products because they’re ‘processed’. When we need to be using less land for agriculture we’ve seen a recent resurgence in organic, but more land-hungry, farming. When more of us need to be living in dense cities I hear more people dreaming of a romantic life in the countryside with a self-sufficient garden plot.

Lab-grown meat, dense cities and nuclear energy need a rebrand.