Environmental impact of meat production - Wikipedia
The 2006 report
Livestock's Long Shadow, released by the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations, states that "the livestock sector is a major stressor on many ecosystems and on the planet as a whole. Globally it is one of the largest sources of
greenhouse gases (GHG) and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of
biodiversity, while in developed and emerging countries it is perhaps the leading source of
water pollution."
[1] Removing all US agricultural animals would reduce US greenhouse gas emissionsby 2.6%.[2] (In this and much other FAO usage, but not always elsewhere,
poultry are included as "livestock".) A 2017 study published in the journal
Carbon Balance and Management found animal agriculture's global methane emissions are 11% higher than previous estimates based on data from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
[3] Some fraction of these effects is assignable to non-meat components of the livestock sector such as the wool, egg and dairy industries, and to the livestock used for
tillage. Livestock have been estimated to provide power for tillage of as much as half of the world's
cropland.
[4] According to production data compiled by the FAO, 74 percent of global livestock product tonnage in 2011 was accounted for by non-meat products such as wool, eggs and milk.
[5][
not in citation given] Meat is also considered one of the prime factors contributing to the current
sixth mass extinction.
[6][7][8][9] A July 2018 study in
Science asserts that meat consumption will increase as the result of
human population growth and rising individual incomes, which will increase carbon emissions and further reduce biodiversity.
[10]
