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A dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from direct agricultural production and increase carbon sequestration if resulting spared land was restored to its antecedent natural vegetation. We estimate this double effect by simulating the adoption of the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet by 54 high-income nations representing 68% of global gross domestic product and 17% of population. Our results show that such dietary change could reduce annual agricultural production emissions of high-income nations’ diets by 61% while sequestering as much as 98.3 (55.6–143.7) GtCO2 equivalent, equal to approximately 14 years of current global agricultural emissions until natural vegetation matures. This amount could potentially fulfil high-income nations’ future sum of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) obligations under the principle of equal per capita CDR responsibilities. Linking land, food, climate and public health policy will be vital to harnessing the opportunities of a double climate dividend.
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Articles
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00431-5
1Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, the Netherlands. 2College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural
University, Beijing, China. 3The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO, The Hague, the Netherlands. 4Department of Geography,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. 5Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), Nelson Institute for Environmental
Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. 6Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna,
Austria. 7Leiden University College The Hague, The Hague, the Netherlands. e-mail: z.sun@cml.leidenuniv.nl
Agriculture is key to determining the rate and depth of cli-
matic change. Current food system emissions alone may pre-
clude the limiting of climate warming to 1.5 °C or even 2 °C
above pre-industrial levels1, yet simultaneously, radical land-use and
agricultural management interventions may be crucial strategies for
limiting climatic change2. Dietary change, for one, has been found
to be a practical and effective strategy in multiple studies3,4. The
global food system is responsible for ~13.7 GtCO2e emissions per
year, accounting for 26% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions5. Agricultural production, particularly animal-derived
products and land-use change, accounts for the largest propor-
tion of these emissions6. In 2013, per capita meat consumption in
high-income countries was almost six times greater than that in
low-income countries6. Animal-derived products account for 70%
of food-system emissions in high-income countries but only 22%
in low–middle-income countries7. Attribution of these emissions is
complicated by agricultural globalization, whereby food consump-
tion in high-income countries drives overseas GHG emissions
through international trade8. As such, dietary change in high-income
countries may hold the potential to substantially reduce agricultural
emissions around the world—a potential climate ‘dividend’.
Shifting from current dietary patterns in high-income nations to
healthier alternatives with few or no animal products could simul-
taneously spare agricultural land for other uses. While a portion of
this land may ultimately be used for various types of development
and/or bioenergy, its use for intentional ecosystem restoration—a
‘natural climate solution2,9—would represent a second additional
carbon dividend from dietary change. In many regions, reverting
cropland to its antecedent or ‘potential’ natural vegetation (PNV)
can substantially increase aboveground biomass carbon (AGBC),
belowground biomass carbon (BGBC) and soil organic carbon
(SOC) stocks8,1013 with additional co-benefits for biodiversity14
and other ecosystem services. Recent studies highlight the large
magnitude of this sequestration potential. Global vegetation is
believed to currently store less than 50% (450 GtC) of its potential
carbon stock (916 GtC) due to appropriative land use11. Likewise,
global soils have lost 116 GtC over the course of agricultural history
due to carbon-cycle imbalances imposed by cultivation and other
human appropriation15. A substantial portion of these carbon stocks
could be recovered if land is spared by dietary change and subse-
quently restored to PNV. However, the extent to which land could
be spared has not been comprehensively assessed due, in part, to
the complex trade relationships between food producers and con-
sumers8. Such relationships are particularly relevant to the land-use
footprints of high-income nations that import large amounts of
food from around the world16.
We assess the potential for a ‘double dividend’ for GHG emis-
sions mitigation via dietary change from both reduced direct agri-
cultural production emissions and carbon sequestration via land
sparing whereby agricultural lands can revert to other uses. While
linked, these elements play out over two different timeframes: the
first, reduced production emissions, influences the sector’s annual
GHG contribution, while the second, sequestration, often requires
decades or even centuries to realize its full potential. We conceptu-
alize the latter effect as a one-time ‘committed’ mass of carbon that
is sequestered over an unspecified period after restoration is ini-
tiated (Methods). In addition, information and knowledge nudges
could motivate the public’s perception and individual intrinsic iden-
tity on sustainable diets, which would facilitate value-driven actions
on diet change17,18. However, such climate benefits will materialize
only if land upstream in the supply chain is spared from agricul-
tural activities. We use data for the year 2010 from the Food and
Agriculture Biomass Input–Output dataset (FABIO)19 to relate the
international final demand for food items with primary agricultural
production. FABIO is a physical global multi-regional input–out-
put table and so avoids price-based impacts and issues in estimating
Dietary change in high-income nations alone can
lead to substantial double climate dividend
Zhongxiao Sun 1,2 ✉ , Laura Scherer 1, Arnold Tukker1,3, Seth A. Spawn-Lee 4,5, Martin Bruckner 6,
Holly K. Gibbs4,5 and Paul Behrens 1,7
A dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations could reduce greenhouse gas emissions
from direct agricultural production and increase carbon sequestration if resulting spared land was restored to its antecedent
natural vegetation. We estimate this double effect by simulating the adoption of the EATLancet planetary health diet by 54
high-income nations representing 68% of global gross domestic product and 17% of population. Our results show that such
dietary change could reduce annual agricultural production emissions of high-income nations’ diets by 61% while sequestering
as much as 98.3 (55.6–143.7) GtCO2 equivalent, equal to approximately 14 years of current global agricultural emissions until
natural vegetation matures. This amount could potentially fulfil high-income nations’ future sum of carbon dioxide removal
(CDR) obligations under the principle of equal per capita CDR responsibilities. Linking land, food, climate and public health
policy will be vital to harnessing the opportunities of a double climate dividend.
NATURE FOOD | VOL 3 | JANUARY 2022 | 29–37 | www.nature.com/natfood 29
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved
... Consequently, a dietary shift away from animalbased foods would reduce the share of these systems in agricultural landscapes. Grasslands, however, can store more carbon (C) than arable crops meaning that while such a diet shift can reduce food system emissions, it can negatively impact the GHG balance of agricultural soils by reducing the build-up of soil organic carbon (SOC) (Godde et al., 2020;Sun et al., 2022), which is central mitigation strategy to reduce agriculture's GHG emissions (Bossio et al., 2020). Both grasslands and arable crops are associated with high nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emissions, a potent GHG mainly produced by agricultural soils (Butterbach-Bahl et al., 2013). ...
... Previous efforts to assess the impact of diet shifts on the soil GHG balance have used a range of methodologies. To understand the impacts for SOC, the approaches include simple soil C models and data-driven models with an oversimplified representation of soil processes driving C cycles (Nijdam et al., 2012;Goglio et al., 2015;Bessou et al., 2020;Moberg et al., 2019;Hammar et al., 2022;Sun et al., 2022), or C models operating at low spatial resolution and without accounting for management practices that affect SOC (Weindl et al., 2017;Knudsen et al., 2019;Saarinen et al., 2023). To understand the impact of diet shifts on soil N 2 O emissions, current assessments often rely on fixed emission factors (EF) that only consider nitrogen (N) inputs to the soil (Nijdam et al., 2012;Theurl et al., 2020). ...
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CONTEXT Current food systems account for approximately 30 % of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; therefore, consumers' dietary preferences can have strong environmental consequences. This is well known for the GHG mitigation achieved by reducing animal protein consumption and associated methane emissions. However, the impact of diet shifts on the soil GHG balance has not been comprehensively evaluated yet. OBJECTIVE To comprehensively assess the impact of the EAT-Lancet healthy diet on the net soil GHG balance at a national level with an advanced process-based modelling framework, using Denmark as a case study. METHODS We adopted a two-sided approach. Firstly, we used the economic general equilibrium model MAGNET to quantify the demand-driven changes in food consumption and land use at the national level following the adoption of the EAT-Lancet healthy diet for the European Union (EU). We then used the DayCent process-based biogeochemical model to assess the implications of these changes for the GHG balance of agricultural soils at a national scale in Denmark. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS Our findings indicate that, compared to business-as-usual diets, the full adoption of the EAT-Lancet reference diet would cause significant carbon losses (up to 480 Gg CO2e y−1) and increased N2O emissions (2.1 % representing 50 Gg CO2e y−1) from 2030 to 2100 in agricultural soils. These changes primarily stem from the reduction in animal manure application to soil and a decrease in the share of permanent grasslands. The soil GHG balance differed largely across pedo-climatic conditions. SIGNIFICANCE Although these results do not cancel the GHG reductions achieved by reducing livestock production (1390 Gg CO2e y−1), they underscore the importance of comprehensively accounting for soil GHG emissions as they offset some of the benefits of adopting a plant-based healthy diet. Finally, the marked regional variation in net soil GHG balances highlights the need for spatially explicit assessments in other regions and at larger scales.
... One of the key drivers of agricultural emissions is the changing food demand due to dietary changes in the country since the 1980s, characterized mainly by a rapid shift from a mostly plant-based diet toward a more meat-intensive one, with a corresponding substantial increase in per capita meat consumption, which has increased from 30-40 g to 90-140 g over 1980-2010 8 . Animal-based diets exhibit a greater nitrogen and carbon footprint compared to plant-based diets, primarily due to the lower resource and energy conversion efficiency involved in meat production and the abundance of animal waste in livestock systems (Fig. S2) 22,23 . Such diet-driven changes between the 1980s and 2010s have, in turn, increased agricultural NH 3 emissions by more than 60% and annual PM 2.5 by up to 10 μg m -3 , which is roughly 20% of the total PM 2.5 increase coming from all sources over the same period 8 . ...
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Agriculture is an important contributor to air pollution and its health impacts, with ramifications for environmental and health inequity. A substantial fraction of these effects can be attributable to dietary changes, but the extent of such impacts remains unclear. Here we show that the PM2.5-related mortality attributable specifically to dietary changes and the associated rising agricultural emissions has a high Gini coefficient of 0.369 in China in 2010, and raises the Gini coefficient of all-cause PM2.5-related mortality from 0.189 to 0.197 with more uneven allocation among income groups, reflecting worsened health inequity and an export of pollution from richer coastal regions to poorer agricultural regions via food trade. Such mortality is associated positively with urbanization but negatively with green space and healthcare quality. Our results also provide empirical evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, and offer decision support for equitable clean air, food and health policies in China.
... However, food security is not a concern in the EU context, although lower output is a risk in terms of carbon leakage and displacement of EU emissions abroad. Recent studies have shown that, if the transition to agroecological practices is coupled with a shift towards more plant-based diets and a reduction in food waste, this can ensure sufficient agricultural output and simultaneously deliver climate, environmental and health goals (Schiavo et al., 2023;Sun et al. 2022). ...
... More broadly, our scenarios also imply potentially substantial labour market feedback when exploring alternative pathways. For example, transitions to low-externality diets, often involving a dietary shift away from animal-based foods 43,44 , will impact labour markets, probably reducing livestock labour while fostering transitions within crop sectors, in addition to any potential health and environment outcomes. Moreover, as widely recognized, land and water constraints may limit the large-scale production of purpose-grown bioenergy crops 26,45 . ...
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... Agriculture, animal farming, and aquaculture, all components of our food system, are facing significant challenges owing to land degradation, climate change, and the increasing frequency of climate-related disasters [2,3]. Although shifting toward plant-based diets is more environmentally sustainable, it still relies on seasonal conditions and requires the substantial use of land, water, and chemicals [4]. In contrast, microorganisms are more ecological and resilient food sources than traditional protein sources, such as meat [5,6]. ...
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... Participants' willingness to adopt LCEICL behaviours was the outcome variable. It was assessed with seven items that covered both energy and carbon footprints: air travel (Gössling and Humpe, 2020), car driving (Leroutier and Quirion, 2022), manufactured products (Ivanova and Wood, 2020), housing energy needs (Oswald et al., 2020), food consumption (Sun et al., 2022), clothing (Ivanova and Wood, 2020), and investment behaviour (Nielsen et al., 2021). After begin exposed to a given vignette, they were asked to respond to, for example, the following statement, 'I am willing to reduce my air travel on an annual basis' (e.g., by avoiding short-and long-distance trips); 0 = No, 1 = Yes. ...
... It is suggested that a dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations can help reduce GHG emissions from agricultural production 44 . Building on this, this study further reveals that replacing a certain proportion of demand in the cattle sector with vegetables and other animal meats could reduce emissions in major exporting country such as India and Brazil. ...
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