Around the world for decades, the agriculture industry has been converting rainforest and savannah into pasture to grow cows and enormous amounts of feed crops—a practice that has directly lead to the loss of biodiversity and destruction of habitats.
A team of scientists have pointed the finger at humans who eat meat and animal-based products—and its impact on global land use—as the single largest threat to the world’s plant and animal life biodiversity. In fact, the predicted habitat and biodiversity loss resulting from billions of individual humans eating animal meat is so monstrous that it will cause more species extinctions than any other factor.
Now we can say, only slightly fancifully: You eat a steak, you kill a lemur in Madagascar. You eat a chicken, you kill an Amazonian parrot.
— Gidon Eshel, geophysicist at Bard College, New York
How Eating Meat is Destroying Biodiversity
Animal agriculture is a major cause of species extinction. The growing meat eating habit will create an escalating toll as people clear more and more land to grow animals and feed crops, the study in the current issue of Science of the Total Environment predicts.
Although some agricultural expansion is driven by farmers growing crops for direct human consumption, animal agriculture production, including feed crop production, accounts for approximately three-quarters of all agricultural land. Animal agriculture accounts for nearly one-third of the ice-free land surface of the planet—making it the single largest anthropogenic land use type.
The study states that animal agriculture “is the single largest driver of habitat loss, and both livestock and feedstock production are increasing in developing tropical countries where the majority of biological diversity resides” and that the “negative impact on biodiversity can be significantly reduced by .. reducing demand for animal-based food products and increasing proportions of plant-based foods in diets.”
The rising global demand for meat, feed crops, and biofuel are driving rapid agro-industrial expansion in forest regions. Across our global ecosystems, twenty-five biodiversity hotspots have been identified. These hotspots collectively contain approximately 44% of the world’s plants and 35% of terrestrial vertebrates in an area that formerly covered only about 12% of the entire land surface of planet Earth. Due to human activities, the total extent of these biodiversity hotspots has been reduced by nearly 90% of the original size—meaning that this wealth of biodiversity is now restricted to only <2% of Earth’s land surface.
Animal products currently make up approximately 21% of the weight of food in global human diets—a 24% increase since the 1960s. However, a great disparity exists among developed and developing countries. Many developed countries have consistently maintained high animal product consumption rates constituting 40% or more of diets by mass.
The study also looked at data regarding the required future expansion of agricultural lands to meet the projected 9.6 billion large human population by 2050 and stated that the “projected land base required .. to support livestock production in several megadiverse countries exceeds 30–50% of their current agricultural areas.”
Never before has so much old-growth and primary forest been converted to human land uses so quickly as in the Amazon region. We already can see the devastating impact of cattle ranching and soy feed production on the Amazon rainforest where the “lungs of our planet” is now unable to regulate its own precipitation systems. The rapid deforestation is causing the moisture-generating mechanism to weaken and is actually causing droughts in many major urban communities in South America.
At least 130,000 species of native animals and plants, nearly 8% of all life on Earth, are found in Australia. Of the 1,250 plant and 390 animal species listed as threatened by the Australian government (excluding extinct and marine species), 964 plant species (77%) and 286 animal species (73%) have deforestation, and the resulting fragmentation or degradation of their habitats, listed as threats.
The most common pressure causing deforestation and loss of biodiversity in Australia is large- and small-scale animal agriculture.
Climate Change
Over the past 30 years, climate change has produced numerous shifts in the distributions and abundances of species, and its effects are projected to increase dramatically in the future leading to declines or extinctions of many species on land and in the ocean.
Animal agriculture is a large contributor to global warming through the production of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (MH4), and nitrous oxide (N20)). When food production is looked at holistically, global greenhouse gas emissions estimates are between 43% – 57%, instead of the commonly quoted 11%-15% which excludes a wide range of relating activities.
Animal agriculture production is a leading cause of climate change, soil loss, water and nutrient pollution, and decreases of apex predators and wild herbivores, compounding pressures on ecosystems and biodiversity.
Land-use change involves not only the release of carbon with the conversion of forests and other habitats into grazing pastures, but also the conversion of natural grasslands into intensive feed crop agriculture, which is an ongoing trend in developing countries as intensive, industrial livestock production is increasing.
The consumption of meat and animal-based products, along side fossil fuels, is a leading cause of climate change. Climate change will impact on a number of different social, cultural, and natural resource levels, such as human health, infrastructure, and transportation systems, as well as energy, food, and water supplies.
China, Africa and India’s Growing Impact
There is special mounting concern over bushmeat consumption in Africa and southeastern Asia, as well as the high growth-rate per capita meat consumption in China, where the rate of meat production of tropical megadiverse countries are increasing.
Because of changing dietary habits and increasing population densities, China will have especially profound future effects on biodiversity far beyond its own borders. Their production has increased enormously over the past 50 years—by 2012, China’s annual meat consumption of 71 million tons was more than double that in the United States. As China attains dietary habits similar to that of the United States during the next 35 years, each of its projected 1.5 billion inhabitants would increase their consumption of animal products by an average of 138%.
This increase will place extreme pressure on countries such as South America, location of the Amazon rainforest, where vast amounts of imports originate.
In Africa, there has been a rise in feedstock production as international agricultural companies are acquiring or leasing land in to grow feed crops for export markets, modelled after the industrial development of the Brazilian Cerrado region. Meanwhile, the hunting of wildlife as a food source is a multibillion-dollar trade in Africa and southeastern Asia, and is the most immediate threat to the persistence of tropical vertebrates, which also causes many cascading trophic effects.
India, the world’s second most populous country, has also shown rising animal product consumption with increasing affluence. However, its rates of increase have been lower than China, rising from approximately 15% of diets by mass in the 1960s to 21% in the late 2000s.
The Study
The study’s lead author, Brian Machovina from the Florida International University, asked how other species were impacted by modern animal agriculture production. To find out, the team looked at studies that identified the world’s biodiversity hotspots—those areas that contain the highest percentage of endemic plant and animal species which are mostly located in tropical nations. Then, they picked out the countries which are likely to expand their animal agriculture operations and determined where and how much land will be lost to grazing and growing feed crops.
Identified were 15 megadiverse countries where the the greatest shift in land use would occur, which also contain the largest number of species. Machovina says, “by 2050, given current trends, these countries will likely increase the lands used for livestock production by 30% to 50%”—some 3,000,000 square kilometres.
Animal production data in these countries from 1985 to 2013 was gathered from the Food and Agriculture Organization and other studies. With the amounts of land the farmed animals required, they extrapolated the likely future expansion of agricultural lands and finally created overlay maps. The habitat loss is so great that it will cause more extinctions than any other factor, the study notes, particularly when coupled with other harmful effects of animal agriculture production, including climate change and pollution.
What Can We Do?
It’s really simple and the steps forward are logically sound. With the growing abundance of evidence available to us, our impacts on biodiversity can be remediated through reducing the demand for animal-based food products and increasing proportions of plant-based foods in our diets.
Quite literally, all you have to do to stop participating in the destruction of global biodiversity, where plant and animal life are lost at astounding rates, is one thing: Stop eating animal products and eat delicious plant based foods instead. Less resources, less land and less energy are used to produce plant based foods compared to what is consumed in meat centric diets.
Such efforts would also impart positive impacts on human health through reduction of diseases of nutritional extravagance. Various studies show the links between animal meat and chronic inflammatory diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Meanwhile, a wholefoods plant-based diet is known to reverse many of these diseases.
The solution is simple.
Sources: Biodiversity conservation: The key is reducing meat consumption study, Elsevier, ScienceMag.
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