//it's in English
//this is NOT mine

The reasons people become vegetarian are varied. Some people don’t eat meat because they don’t like the taste, or they don’t want to hurt animals. Others choose vegetarianism for health reasons. More recently, however, people are changing their eating habits to help protect the environment. If everyone became vegetarian it would have a huge impact on the global climate.

Food production causes up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and most of those emissions are from farming animals. You may be surprised to hear that in the US, for example, an average family produces more greenhouse gases from the meat they eat than from driving cars! Data models show what would happen if everyone became vegetarian by 2050. The results indicate that food-related emissions would drop by about 60%.

Farming, especially animal farming, takes up a lot of space. Agricultural land takes up approximately a third of the land surface of the earth, and nearly 70% of that is used for farming animals.

If we all went vegetarian, 80% of the land used for farming animals could be turned back into grasslands and forests that would, in turn, capture carbon dioxide and help slow down climate change. The remaining 10-20% of farmland could be used for growing vegetable crops. Today, one third of the land we use for growing plants is actually used to feed animals, not humans! Replanting the forests would require a lot of planning and investment, however.  Most farmland is now highly degraded and natural vegetation would need help to regrow.

If farms didn’t have animals, many people working on the land would lose their jobs. However, their experience could be used in different ways: employing them to plant new forests or producing bioenergy from plant waste. We would need to provide real alternatives for farmers or we risk poverty and migration as a result.
Transforming the world so that it is completely vegetarian would mean changing the way humans live …forcing people to stop eating meat might just be impossible.

There is an alternative path, however. The whole world does not need to become completely vegetarian to help save the planet and improve our health. All we need to do is eat meat in moderation by following the World Health Organisation’s dietary recommendations. Just by eating smaller portions of meat, and less often, we could bring down greenhouse gas emissions by 20%. Perhaps there is a future where people no longer eat meat, but it might be easier to get there one step at a time.