William Atkins
Wednesday, 11 February 2009 03:27
Science -
Climate
Page 2 of 4
In addition, livestock reside on 80% of the land that humans have developed over the years for the raising of cows, pigs, chickens, and other domesticated animals, along with the growing of crops.
Such land development is called anthropogenic land use.
Because beef and pork have also been pointed to as one dietary cause of adverse health problems in humans—along with these before-mentioned reasons—the researchers decided to find out how much impact the livestock sector has on the ability of humans to stabilize our changing global climate.
They found that a
“global food transition to less meat, or even a complete switch to plant-based protein food” could
“have a dramatic effect on land use.” [Abstract to their paper]
They stated that a maximum of 2,800 million hectares, or 6,919 million acres, of pasture and 100 million hectares (247 million acres) of cropland could be removed from anthropogenic land use (that is, land used for livestock use) so that vegetation could take over growing on all of this land.
One hectare is equal to 10,000 square meters, or 11,960 square yards.
Such action of exchanging livestock land for vegetation land would reduce
“substantially” (according to the Dutch authors) the emission of methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.
Methane, with molecular formula CH
4, is the principle component of natural gas. It is one of the more potent greenhouse gases.
Nitrous oxide (commonly called laughing gas) has a molecular formula of N
2O. Also a potent greenhouse gas, it is the fourth largest contributor to the greenhouse effect, only behind carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor.
Page three adds more to the discussion.
