Research paper urges governments to ignore IPCC and move against livestock and meat
04/12/2014
In November, the IPCC issued a new synthesis document, which distils and integrates the findings of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report produced by more than 800 scientists and released over the past 13 months. The organisation has called the Fifth Assessment Report “the most comprehensive assessment of climate change ever undertaken”.
Criticism of the livestock sector and calls for farmers to raise fewer animals and for people to reduce the meat and dairy content of their diets are absent from the synthesis report. It says reducing emissions of non-CO2 climate forcing agents, including methane, can be an important element of mitigation strategies and insists that low-cost options to reduce many of these emissions are available. But it says specifically that methane emissions from livestock “are difficult to mitigate”.
Chatham House, also called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, an independent policy institute based in London, issued a report on December 3 that contradicts the IPCC synthesis document’s recommendations. In a research paper from its Energy, Environment and Resources department, entitled ‘Livestock – Climate Change’s Forgotten Sector’, Chatham House urges governments to include action on livestock and meat production in their climate-change strategies.
“The livestock sector is a major emitter of greenhouse gases,” the research paper says, “and its contribution to climate change is set to
grow as global demand for animal products rises. It is unlikely that global temperature rises can be kept below two degrees Celsius [the target set by the IPCC for the end of this century] in the absence of a radical shift in meat and dairy consumption.”
It goes on to say that governments and campaign groups appear to think that trying to reduce consumption of animal products is “at best too complex a challenge, and at worst risks backlash” before going on to say that “government interventions and public campaigns in pursuit of societal benefits” have worked in the past, “perhaps most prominently in the case of smoking”.
In contrast, the IPCC synthesis report says most of the mitigation scenarios for climate change that its 800 scientists have suggested are associated with reduced revenues from coal and oil trade for major exporters. A number of major oil companies help fund Chatham House, including BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Saudi Petroleum Overseas, although the organisation insists its research papers do not reflect the views of its funders.
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