Data Exploration: Food and Climate Change Data Introduction
Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryThe food industry must feed billions more people than it did a hundred years ago. In order to understand how the food industry impacts climate change, it’s important to measure what foods are eaten and how many emissions each kind of food contributes. 1100LLearn more at www.oerproject.com
2Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryIntroductionHamburgers are great, right? They taste good, they’re an icon of the twentieth century, and you can layer them up with all kinds of toppings. Hamburgers are great. But, so is a habitable planet.Since the turn of the twentieth century, the global population has risen from 1.65 billion to more than 7.8 billion today. While the rate of population increase is slowing down, the global population will likely increase by another few billion in the next century. If you’ve ever hosted a party, you know what that means: if you have more guests, you need more food.Here’s the good news: we can provide that food. With the right innovations and policies, we can have the resources to feed everyone, even if there are more of us. Here’s the bad news: we can’t keep feeding everyone hamburgers. If we are going to feed Earth’s growing population, we need structural changes to what we eat and how we grow it. It’s a big problem, so let’s approach it one bite at a time, starting with a simple question.Where’s the beef?For much of human history, most of the world’s land was wilderness: forests and grasslands dominated its landscapes. A thousand years ago, only 4 million square kilometers—less than 4 percent of the world’s habitable land area (the land that humans can live on) was used for farming. Today, half of all habitable land is used for agriculture. As you can see in Chart 1, livestock—the animals we eat—account for most of that land.Cows are big. They eat a lot. They need a lot of water. But, more importantly, they need a lot of land. We use a lot more land to raise livestock than we do to grow the crops we eat. If we combine pastures used for grazing with land used to grow crops for the animals to eat, livestock accounts for 77 percent of global farming land. While livestock takes up most of the world’s agricultural land it only produces 18 percent of the world’s calories and 37 percent of total protein.Chart 1Explore at: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#half-of-the-world-s-habitable-land-is-used-for-agricultureBy Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0.
3Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryChart 2 below shows that producing a given unit of beef, dairy or animal-based foods needs much more land than vegetables fruits, legumes, or grain. Producing 1,000 kilocalories of beef requires about 120 square meters of land. At the bottom of the chart, we see that 1,000 kilocalories of maize (corn) requires less than one square meter of land. But, it’s not just that livestock is a less efficient use of land. As agricultural land expanded, we cut down a lot of trees. And, forests pull a lot of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere—making them one of our most important allies in combating climate change.Chart 2Explore at: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#land-use-footprint-of-food By Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0. Cow burpsAs more and more land is cleared to make room for agriculture, we reduce the planet’s natural abilities to regulate the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. On top of that, we release greenhouse gases through other processes in the food system. Food production is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Chart 3 shows how the different parts of our food production system account for these emissions.
4Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryChart 3Explore at: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food#food-production-is-responsible-for-one-quarter-of-the-world-s-greenhouse-gas-emissions By Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0. Why does livestock produce so much greenhouse gases? Livestock—mainly cattle—produce methane through their digestive processes. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Their burps and farts (but mainly burps) account for as much as four percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. But, it’s not just cow burps. As Chart 3 shows, these burps combined with emissions from manure and pasture for animals raised for meat, dairy, eggs, and seafood production account for almost one-third of food emissions. Another six percent of food emissions come from the crops that we feed to livestock. Two-thirds of emissions from agricultural land use comes from land cleared for livestock.
5Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherrySustainable bovine flatulenceSo, what’s a bipedal omnivore to do? What’s the best way to reduce our carbon footprint through the food we grow, both on an individual and societal level?“Eating local” is a recommendation you hear often. While it might make sense intuitively—after all, transport does lead to emissions—it is one of the most misguided pieces of advice. Eating locally would only have a significant impact if transport was responsible for a large share of food’s final carbon footprint. For most foods, this is not the case. Emissions from transportation make up a very small amount of the emissions from food. Chart 4 makes the argument that what you eat is far more important than where your food traveled from.Chart 4Explore at: https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local By Our World in Data, CC BY 4.0.
6Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryIn Chart 4, we see greenhouse gas emissions from 29 different food products—from beef at the top to nuts at the bottom. For each product, you can see which stage in the supply chain its emissions originate from. This extends from land use changes on the left, through to transport and packaging on the right. There are massive differences in the emissions of different foods: producing a kilogram of beef emits 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases while peas emit just 1 kilogram of gases per kilogram of food. Overall, animal-based foods tend to have a higher footprint than plant-based.For most foods, most emissions result from land use and from processes at the farm stage. Transport is a small contributor to emissions. Eating local beef or lamb has many times the carbon footprint of most other foods. Whether they are grown locally or shipped from the other side of the world matters very little for total emissions. Whether you buy it from the farmer next door or from far away, it is not the location that makes the carbon footprint of your dinner large, but the fact that it is beef.ConclusionIn the coming century, we will need to make more food while also figuring out ways to reduce emissions from food production. It’s a tall order. But, there are societal and individual ways to make a difference. We use a lot more land to produce food than we did 1,000 years ago, but we’ve also gotten a lot better at farming. Crop yields have increased significantly in recent decades, meaning we can grow a lot more food on less land. Globally, to produce the same amount of crops as we did in 1961, we need only 30 percent of the farmland.Climate change is a big, global problem, and it might make you feel a little helpless. And, it’s true that we need big, global solutions. Major innovations in agriculture will require big efforts at the level of huge corporations and governments. But, it’s also true that individual choices can make significant contributions to addressing climate change. Your choices about what to eat have impacts beyond your local grocery. For example, choosing to eat lessmeat might be more effective at reducing your carbon footprint than eating local meat. If you struggle to cut back on meat, opting for chicken or pork instead of a hamburger can also go a long way.
7Food Production and Climate Change Data IntroductionBy Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, adapted by Trevor Getz and Bennett SherryHannah RitchieHannah is Senior Researcher and Head of Research at Our World In Data. She focuses on the long-term development of food supply, agriculture, energy, and environment, and their compatibility with global development. Hannah completed her PhD in GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh.Max RoserMax is the founder and director of Our World in Data. He began the project in 2011 and for several years was the sole author, until receiving funding for the formation of a team. Max’s research focuses on poverty, global health, and the distribution of incomes. He is also Programme Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at the University of Oxford, and Co-executive Director of Global Change Data Lab, the non-profit organization that publishes and maintains the website and the data tools that make OWID’s work possible.Image creditsCover image: A dry sunflowers field in Bram, France. Due to a drought not seen in more than 500 years in Europe, yields are falling or are lost in France. Even sunflowers are dying in the fields due to the of rain. The french production of sunflowers will be 2.9% less than in 2021 but on a surface area 22.5% more than in 2021. At equal surface area, the production will be 24% lower than in 2021. Bram (near Toulouse), in Aude, France, on September 19th 2022. © Alain Pitton / NurPhoto / Getty Images.Articles leveled by Newsela have been adjusted along several dimensions of text complexity including sentence structure, vocabulary and organization. The number followed by L indicates the Lexile measure of the article. For more information on Lexile measures and how they correspond to grade levels: www.lexile.com/educators/understanding-lexile-measures/To learn more about Newsela, visit www.newsela.com/about.The Lexile® Framework for ReadingThe Lexile® Framework for Reading evaluates reading ability and text complexity on the same developmental scale. Unlike other measurement systems, the Lexile Framework determines reading ability based on actual assessments, rather than generalized age or grade levels. Recognized as the standard for matching readers with texts, tens of millions of students worldwide receive a Lexile measure that helps them find targeted readings from the more than 100 million articles, books and websites that have been measured. Lexile measures connect learners of all ages with resources at the right level of challenge and monitors their progress toward state and national proficiency standards. More information about the Lexile® Framework can be found at www.Lexile.com.OER Project aims to empower teachers by offering free and fully supported history courses for middle- and high-school students. Your account is the key to accessing our standards-aligned courses that are designed with built-in supports like leveled readings, audio recordings of texts, video transcripts, and more. Offerings include a variety of materials, from full-year, standards-based courses to shorter course extensions, all of which build upon foundational historical thinking skills in preparation for AP, college, and beyond. To learn more about The OER Project, visit www.oerproject.com