According to current trends, the greenhouse gas emissions from the world’s food system will cause Earth’s surface temperatures to rise by nearly one degree Celsius by 2100, negating the climate goals of the Paris Agreement, experts warned on Monday.
They noted in Nature Climate Change that a significant overhaul of the industry, from production to distribution to consumption, could cut those emissions by more than half even as the world’s population grows.
Since the late 1800s, the Earth’s surface has warmed by 1.2C, leaving only a small window to remain under the 2015 treaty’s primary objective of keeping warming to “well under” 2C.
The aspirational limit of 1.5C, which science later demonstrated to be a much safer threshold to prevent catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate impacts, such as coastal flooding, heatwaves, and drought, is even further out of reach.
“Mitigating emissions from the food sector is essential to working toward a secure climate future,” the study’s lead author Catherine Ivanovich, a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York, told AFP.
Only a third of the national emission reduction plans under the Paris Agreement include any measure to reduce carbon pollution from agriculture or livestock, despite the fact that the global food system is responsible for about 15% of the present warming levels.
Ivanovich and her coworkers examined separately each of the three primary greenhouse gases, which differ in their strength and ability to linger in the atmosphere, in order to improve on earlier calculations of how much feeding the world contributes to global warming.
Carbon dioxide is a gas that enters the atmosphere and stays there for millennia. Methane only lingers for about ten years, but during that period it is almost a hundred times more effective at holding onto the heat from the Sun.
