Climate Change: The Threat Hidden in Your Hamburger
Climate Change crisis: That hamburger you just ate may be more carbon-intensive than you think. Researchers have for the first time quantified rising greenhouse gas emissions embodied in the international trade of specific agricultural products like beef that results in deforestation.
Such “land-use emissions” account for about 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions and mostly occur in poorer countries that export food to the United States, Europe, China and other industrialized regions, according to a peer-reviewed paper published May 6 in the journal Science. “These land-use emissions are substantial enough to threaten international climate goals even if fossil fuel emissions are drastically reduced,” the paper stated.
Land-use emissions are those from agriculture production, such as the methane burped by grazing cattle, as well as greenhouse gases emitted from cutting down forests for agricultural purposes like creating pastures for livestock. The researchers found that three-quarters of emissions from international agriculture trade are from changes in land use. A model they created based on trade and agricultural data found that between 2004 and 2017, land-use emissions in international trade increased 14%.
“The land-use change problem needs to be front and center on our radar,” said Steven Davis, a co-author of the paper and an associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine.
Davis and other scientists said wealthy nations are outsourcing land-use emissions to countries such as Brazil and Indonesia. “In places like the US or Europe, there’s very little land-use change going on for agriculture because we did our deforestation earlier in our history,” said Davis.
Timothy Seachinger,
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