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News Page 4 Street Roots • March 4-10, 2016 A low-carbon diet for a healthy planet To meet greenhouse gas emissions goals for 2050, we’ll need to change our eating habits, researcher Z a k Accuardi explains BY E M IL Y GREEN S T A F F W R IT E R f you want to significantly reduce your carbon footprint, it might be time to rethink your diet. Agriculture is responsible for enormous quantities of greenhouse gases. Livestock production alone accounts for 15 percent of all human-produced emissions globally, according to the U.N. But not all foods are carbon-emitting equals. By making informed choices at the grocery store, you can reel in your personal contributions to our planet’s rapidly changing climate. Zak Accuardi recently completed a fellowship at Project Drawdown, where he focused on the impact of dietary choices on climate change. Project Drawdown is a California-based coalition I of more than 200 researchers, scientists, - - terms of greenhouse gas emissions. He not only examined emissions from an item’s production, but also from processing, cleaning and transporting, and even whether or not it was refrigerated at the grocery store. “All those activities have an environmental impact that we need to understand in order to fully account for the impact that food has on the environment,” he said. During an interview with Street Roots, Accuardi explained what a low- carbon diet looks like, what foods have the greatest impact on climate change, and innovations taking place in agriculture that might help us keep some of our favorite foods on the menu. E m ily G reen : How much o f an impact does our diet have on climate change? The most Z ak A ccuardi: important dietary Estimates vary, but from changes Americans the Intergovernmental can make to reduce Panel on Climate Change their environmental data, which is the leading impacts are eating authority on climate science, roughly 20 less beef and lamb, percent of our total substituting as greenhouse gas emissions much plant-based come from either protein for animal- agriculture or livestock based protein production and the as possible, not changes in land use, which is often shorthand for overeating, and deforestation. Twenty buying the right percent may or may not amount of food in | sound like a lot, but that’s the first place so you { more than the entirety of don't need to throw | the transportation sector - so cars and airplanes and so much away." policymakers, students, activists and business leaders from around the world, assembled to research technological and social solutions to climate change. “Climate scientists have done a really good job of highlighting what will happen if we don’t act to reduce our emissions,” Accuardi said. “But nobody has done a systematic accounting of what could happen if we use all of the knowledge we already have to apply technologies and policies - and individual behavior changes - that freight transportation and we know will have some Z A K A CCU A R D I, boats. That’s more than kind of an im pact” RFSEARt HER the entirety of the building This is a gap Project sector, so all of the Drawdown intends to fill by electricity and heating that disseminating research such we use in buildings, and that’s nearly as as Accuardi’s to communities around the much as the entirety of the industrial sector world. - so everything that we make. Accuardi is a Portland native who The 20 percent number, I find to be specializes in sustainable urban interesting, because a commonly articulated development He earned his undergraduate emissions reduction goal is that we need to degree in environmental engineering from reduce 80 percent of global emissions by Columbia University and his master’s in the year 2050, so to me, this demonstrates technology and policy from Massachusetts that some very substantial behavior change Institute of Technology, and he’s served as a will be necessary because even if we achieve consultant to World Bank - not a bad complete carbon neutrality in every other resume for a 26-year-old. Today he’s a sector - in electricity, building, heating, research analyst at TransitCenter in New industrial energy use, transportation, fuel - York City. if we’re able to completely eliminate the Accuardi pored over available data on emissions from all those sectors, we would various foods to determine how they rank in still have to reduce our greenhouse gas SO URCE: Z A K A C C U A R D I emissions from agriculture just by virtue of the fact that population in the world is going to continue to grow between now and 2050. Some of the reductions we need to achieve will be possible by changing agricultural practices and livestock production practices, but that only gets us so far. I don’t think anyone believes that we can achieve complete carbon neutrality in all of those sectors by 2050, so it’s clear that we will need to make some substantial changes in our personal lives around diet E.G.: Were there any particular countries whose diets were creating more carbon emissions than others? ZA.: Absolutely. The tendency is wealthier countries tend to create higher emissions, and in part that’s because affluence correlates with increased consumption of food products like beef, which is among the highest emissions producing. There are exceptions to that. Some regions have fundamentally different food availabilities, and many people are not even able to access sufficient nutrition to maintain their own personal health - the implications being it can be harder to compare countries side by side, because if you wanted to compare the U.S. with Ghana, for example, then you’re looking at completely different context, completely different agricultural systems, totally different traditions around food and what is eaten. E.G.: Are there any countries where cultural aspects might make encouraging a lower carbon diet more o f a challenge? ZA.: It can go in both directions. For example, one of the questions I had was: What is the existing adoption riate of vegetarianism or veganism internationally? And I mostly found there is very little data on that question, if any, that’s really reliable. To the extent that I found anything, it was that India has, perhaps by far, the highest incidence of vegetarianism, and that’s for cultural and religious reasons, and yet at the same time, India is one of the countries that the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. projects to increase its meat consumption most dramatically over time. I think that’s because in India - and the same would be true in China and other rapidly developing countries - as they get more wealthy, they are projected to increase their meat consumption. E .G : i was surprised by how much more emissions come from beef than anything else. Can you explain how beef is creating so much greenhouse gas? ZA.: Beef and lamb are ruminant animals, which is the technical term for multiple stomachs. And they, alongside sheep and goats, need to eat a lot more raw feed in order to gain an equivalent amount of body mass, and end up producing a lot more methane and manure as a resu lt They don’t process the food that they eat very efficiently in the first place, and that biological food processing is the reason they produce so much methane. So any country that has high beef or lamb consumption is going to tend to have a higher emissions share. E.G.: What’s the main source o f emissions when it comes to cows? Is it all the land See CARBON, page 5
