False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

We need to eat less meat, make farming 
more diverse and reduce our food waste.

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What do Buddha, Confucius and Leonardo da 
Vinci have in common? They were all 
proponents of a plant-based diet. 
Their ancient wisdom is lost on current 
generations: the world is eating more meat than 
ever. And the meat industry accounts for 20 
percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which 
come from both the animals themselves and the 
agriculture needed to feed them. 
The solution is simple: we need to eat less meat 
and more plants. Adopting a vegetarian diet can 
cut our carbon emissions from food consumption 
by 63 percent.
How can we achieve this? Public campaigns that 
celebrate plant-based foods and reframe meat 
as a delicacy could begin to shift culturally 
entrenched eating habits. If this message 
reaches only half of the population, we stand to 
save 66 gigatons of carbon emissions by 2050. 
Eating plants won’t be enough, though. We also 
need to change how we grow these plants. 
Modern industrial agriculture is based on 
cultivating a single crop every year, until the soil 
becomes saline and unworkable. What’s worse 
is that soil degraded by such farming rapidly 
releases its carbon content into the air. 
By contrast, sustainable techniques such as 
agroforestry 
embrace 
complex 
plant 
communities that enrich the soil rather than 
deplete it – and release much less CO2. These 
techniques treat nature as an interconnected 
system in which each plant and animal benefits 
from the existence of all others. 
To illuminate this principle, let’s consider 
silvopasture, an ancient agroforestry system 
practiced in Spain and Portugal. Instead of 
grazing on deforested land, silvopasture cows 
are allowed to graze in the forest. Not only do 
the trees provide shade for the animals, but they 
also sequester carbon that counterbalances the 
cow’s methane emissions. If silvopasture was 
increased by 60 percent worldwide, it could save 
31.1 gigatons of carbon emissions by 2050.
Almost as important as what we end up eating is 
what we end up not eating. Despite the 800 
million people in the world still suffering from 
hunger, a third of all food produced never makes 
it onto our plates. Retailers in high-income 
countries are allowed to reject foods based on 
minor bumps and bruises, supermarkets throw 
out food that doesn’t sell, and best-before dates 
are so poorly regulated that they often confuse 
consumers.
Of course, producing food that no one eats 
doesn’t only squander resources – it also 
creates unnecessary greenhouse gases. In fact, 
if we reduced food waste by 50 percent by 2050, 
we could avoid 26.2 gigatons of carbon 
emissions.