In fact, it is estimated that if we were all to eat plant-based diets, the land no longer needed to produce food could be returned to nature and remove the equivalent of 8.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year over the course of 100 years, which is about 15 per cent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.31 So, not only would a plant-based diet reduce total emissions by 13 per cent, but it would also allow us to sequester a further 15 per cent of total annual carbon emissions on top of that.
