Guwahati: Can you believe it that your beef eating habit is having an adverse effect on the climate? This might not be known to many but the truth is that red meat like that of beef leads to more carbon emissions in comparison to cars.
The fact is that beef is responsible for 41% of livestock greenhouse gas emissions and this account for 14.5% of total global emissions. The complete process of beef production requires 28 times more land than to produce pork or chicken and 11 times more water which results into five times more climate-warming emissions. Not only this, in comparison to our staple foods like potatoes, wheat, and rice, the beef production process requires 160 times more land and this is 11 times more emission of greenhouse gases.
Beef is that one kind of meat which is being widely used across the world and is highly preferred by people worldwide. As per the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the changing diets of people have higher chances of contributing 20% of the effort needed for keeping global temperatures restrained from rising 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
Prof Gidon Eshel at Bard College in New York who led a study on the impact of beef on climate change, said, “The big story is just how dramatically impactful beef is compared to all the others. I would strongly hope that governments stay out of people’s diet, but at the same time, there are many government policies that favour of the current diet in which animals feature too prominently. Remove the artificial support given to the livestock industry and rising prices will do the rest. In that way, you are having less government intervention in people’s diet and not more.”
Also read: Tale of a piece of Meat