The global scope of the livestock issue is huge. A 212-page online report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says 26 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is...
inflation. Without having any background information on where the global population is heading towards in terms of diet, I was surprised to learn that the percentage of Earth’s land surface devoted to raising livestock (30%) is expected to double in the next 40 years or so. I would have thought that more people would increasingly start to care about their diet as there is more …
What percentage of global greenhouse emissions come from livestock? 36. What fraction of the earth’s surface is devoted to the production of livestock? 37. Why does becoming vegetarian help reduce an individual carbon footprint? 38. What is the “drawback” of using real trees vs. artificial trees? What do real trees release at night? 39.
Analysis of satellite data included land used for both crops and livestock. The use of agricultural technology creates relative stability in the amount of Earth's land used for crops, as the need...
The implication is that there is an important trade-off between environmental impact and nutrition: for a variety of ecological reasons, including biodiversity and climatic change, we want to reduce our agricultural land pressures; but we also want a healthy and adequately nourished population.
This means that what we eat is more important than how much we eat in determining the amount of land required to produce our food. As we get richer, our diets tend to diversify and per capita meat consumption rises; economic development unfortunately exerts an increasing impact on land resources.
However, there are also a number of countries which fall into the orange category: it would be ecologically impossible for everyone to eat the diet in North America, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and several countries across Europe.