Removing all meat from the human diet to protect the environment isn’t a workable solution outside rich countries, a new paper reports.
Image credits Ulrike Leone.
Calls to remove all meat from our diets to limit CO2 emissions are only realistic in rich, industrialized regions. In low- or middle-income countries, livestock can represent a critical source of income and food, the paper argues, making such changes practically impossible for locals.
Let’s meat halfway
“Conclusions drawn in widely publicized reports argue that a main solution to the climate and human health crisis globally is to eat no or little meat but they are biased towards industrialized, Western systems,” said Birthe Paul, the lead author and environmental scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).