Feeding the world will never be emissions free, report says

Feeding the world will always come with an environmental price tag, the latest major food study has said, requiring governments to deliver deeper emission cuts in energy, transport and industry to offset the unavoidable impact.

The key report, published in The Lancet by a group of 70 food and climate scientists from 35 countries, says the planet can feed a projected 10bn population by 2050 from about 8.2bn now, while halving farming’s greenhouse gas output and avoiding millions of early deaths. But it notes that food systems will never be emissions free.

“Feeding humanity will always be associated with an ecological footprint,” said Johan Rockström, co-chair of the EAT-Lancet Commission and director of the Potsdam Institute, which studies the climate and its impact. Even under the most sustainable scenario, he said, providing food for the worlds population “will still have a certain price tag . . . in the order of 5bn tons of carbon dioxide equivalent”.

Food production makes up an estimated one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.

“If we want to eat, if we want to eat healthy food and feed humanity, then we have to go even faster on decarbonising the other sectors . . . like the energy sector and the transport sector,” Rockström said.

The report’s updated analysis revives the “planetary health diet” first set out by the EAT-Lancet Commission in 2019, which stoked controversy about its push to eat less red meat.

It calls for diets built mainly around plants but not strictly vegetarian, limiting red meat to once a week, poultry and fish to about twice a week and dairy to once a day.

People in high-income countries such as the US and Canada consume several times more red meat than the diet allows, it found, while in some poorer regions in Africa and Asia it indicated a small increase in animal-source foods could improve human nutrition.

‘Big Food’, or the growing dominance and consolidation of global food companies promoting ultra-processed, fast-food-style diets, was also pushing out local, traditional diets in many parts of the world.

Adopting a plant-led diet worldwide could prevent about 15mn premature deaths each year by reducing illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes and some cancers, according to the report. It would also slow deforestation and biodiversity loss linked to livestock feed and pasture, and cut emissions by 15 per cent.

The study says overhauling the food system could save about $5tn a year in healthcare and environmental costs for an annual investment of $200bn-$500bn.

Measures could include redirecting farm subsidies away from beef and dairy towards fruit, vegetables and pulses; taxing foods high in sugar, salt and saturated fat; stricter marketing and labelling rules; and cutting food loss and waste, which now accounts for nearly a third of production.

The authors mapped food’s impact across all nine “planetary boundaries” including global ecological limits for biodiversity, water, land and nutrient pollution, to conclude the food system was the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss, freshwater depletion and nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and a major contributor to climate change.

Many national climate plans, Rockström said, rely on farming going beyond net zero emissions, letting other sectors move too slowly. “The European Union sets the trajectory on the energy transition, which basically does not factor in the fact that you cannot really get agriculture down to zero.”

The report’s release comes as US food and climate policy has become entangled in a wider culture war, with rightwing groups rallying under slogans such as “Make America Healthy Again” to attack plant-based diets and sustainability measures.

Rockström said: “What we’re seeing in the US is questioning climate science . . . assaults on science in general, and even questioning the evidence on health and on healthy food.”

It was “deeply concerning . . . very disappointing and dangerous . . . because it comes at a time when we have overwhelming scientific evidence.”