Experts fault UN climate plan for overlooking 'obvious' need to eat less meat

A UN roadmap to reform the world’s food systems – which account for a third of carbon emissions – has been criticised by experts who say it lacks transparency and fails to properly address the crucial need to reduce meat consumption.

Workers use a tractor to cover an asparagus field with mulching plastics in Brandenburg, eastern Germany, in February 2024. AFP - RALF HIRSCHBERGER

In a commentary published on Monday in the journal Nature Food, academics from the US, Brazil and the Netherlands said the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had “missed opportunities” to cut greenhouse gas emissions, while also offering up solutions that could potentially make things worse. 

Part one of the FAO’s roadmap – the first of its kind – was released at the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai in December. It aims to achieve zero hunger and malnutrition while staying within the 1.5°C climate warming threshold.  

The document, which is to include two more instalments, acknowledged that diets “absolutely” needed to change for the sake of human and planetary health, while offering proposals on how to make that happen.  

'Major oversight'

While praising the FAO’s ambition, the experts said the agency had neglected “one of the most obvious and urgent interventions" – the transition away from the production and consumption of food sourced from animals. 

“Extensive literature has shown that shifting to plant-rich diets that reduce consumption of animal-sourced foods would make a substantial contribution towards meeting climate targets,” the commentary said. 

Also, improving the efficiency of farming techniques – as recommended by the roadmap – would be insufficient to meet the agriculture sector’s methane emissions targets, it added. 

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Lead author of the commentary Cleo Verkuijl, of the Stockholm Environment Institute, likened the FAO's oversight in limiting animal consumption to “publishing a 1.5C roadmap for the energy sector that ignores the need to scale back fossil fuels”. 

Failure to reform food systems – everything from the way food is produced, transported and consumed – would make it impossible to stay below 1.5C of warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.  

This remains true even if fossils fuels were to be immediately phased out. 

'Risky' proposals

Some of the roadmap’s proposals, such as transitioning from beef to chicken and intensifying animal agriculture, risked increasing the risk of anti-microbial resistance and zoonotic diseases, the commentary warned. 

This is because farmed animals – often kept in large populations and in close proximity to humans – are fed high levels of antibiotics and can harbour and transmit dangerous viruses. 

The experts also said it was unclear how the roadmap’s 120 recommended actions were chosen, or how they would in fact help to lower emissions. 

Of particular concern was a failure to mention the so-called “One Health” approach, which means understanding that the health of humans, animals and the environment are interconnected, and that solving problems in one area can benefit the others. 

This is despite the FAO being one of four global agencies that make up the One Health Quadripartite. 

Future instalments of the FAO’s roadmap should to provide clearer goals backed by detailed analysis showing how they contribute to the 1.5°C target, the experts said.  

They should also be transparent about how its recommendations are made, who makes them, and how they're reviewed, with input from environmental and health experts.