COP-OUT 28: There’s less meat on the menu at this year’s climate talks, but there’s plenty of ‘bull’
COP-28’s food catering move marks a notable change from the meat-heavy menus typically found at the annual conference. But a plant-based shift is unlikely to be found where it would count the most, in the conference negotiations where climate targets are set. While the energy and transportation sectors decarbonize, animal agriculture is set to become the biggest source of America’s emissions. That would be a climate travesty, and one that could be averted, if only American and other world leaders were willing to address the 'cow in the room'.
KENNY TORRELLA: Over the next two weeks, an estimated 70,000 people will gather in Dubai for the United Nations COP28 summit. It’s the world’s largest and highest-stakes climate conference, where world leaders gather every year to assess the state of global warming and set targets to slow it down.
As attendees break for meals between meetings, negotiations, and panel discussions, they may notice one striking difference between COP28 and past UN climate conferences: There won’t be much meat on the menu. After a months-long effort by the youth-led Food@COP coalition, the United Arab Emirates environment minister, Mariam Almheiri, announced last month that two-thirds of the food served at the event will be plant-based.
“We know that our food systems are intrinsically linked to the fate of our natural world, and so we have made the progressive decision to ensure that we explore how the catering provided across the event can be responsible and climate conscious,” Almheiri said…
Almheiri was alluding to a fact often overlooked in climate discussions: One-third of global greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to food, with meat and dairy accounting for the lion’s share of it but providing just 18 percent of the world’s calories. Meat and dairy production are also leading causes of other environmental ills, including deforestation, biodiversity loss, pandemic risk, and water pollution. Dairy production alone emits more greenhouse gases than global aviation. Plant-based foods typically have a much smaller carbon footprint, and require far less land and water.
COP’s catering move marks a notable change from the meat-heavy menus typically found at the annual conference, which some have criticized as misaligned with its very goal. But a plant-based shift is unlikely to be found where it would count the most — in the conference negotiations where climate targets are set.
As greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture have become increasingly difficult to ignore, global policymakers now stand at a fork in the road on how to address them. Numerous environmental scientists, including some who’ve published studies on the matter for the UN, have called on wealthy countries to cut back on meat and eat more plant-based meals — a sure way to slash agricultural emissions, but politically challenging.
Down another path lies the more politically palatable, yet far less effective, approach of continuing to eat record amounts of meat in the West while deploying a host of technologies and farming practices, each of which can only marginally shave off livestock emissions.
The world needs a mix of both approaches, but policymakers, out of political expediency and corporate capture, are barreling down the second path, a choice they’ll likely come to regret as climate change intensifies.
“We have only one planet, and we’re not going to be able to feed everyone with the diet of the Europeans,” said Raphael Podselver, director of UN affairs for the nonprofit ProVeg International.
And certainly not with the diet of Americans, who eat almost 70 percent more meat per capita than Europeans, and 200 percent more than the global average — so much that if the US sustains its current level of meat consumption and doesn’t change its farming practices, while the energy and transportation sectors decarbonize, agriculture could become the biggest source of America’s emissions by 2050. That would be a climate travesty, and one that could be averted — if only American and other world leaders were willing to address the cow in the room. SOURCE…
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