<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/19/un-livestock-emissions-report-seriously-distorted-our-work-say-experts>
"A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction
from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted”
their work.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to
underestimate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural
emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which
the Guardian has seen.
Paul Behrens, an associate professor at Leiden University and Matthew Hayek, an
assistant professor at New York University, both accuse the FAO study of
systematic errors, poor framing, and highly inappropriate use of source data.
Hayek told the
Guardian: “The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious,
conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation
possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be. None of the
mistakes had the opposite effect.”
Agriculture accounts for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of which
are attributable to livestock in the form of methane from burps and manure, and
deforestation for grazing and feed crops. As global meat production leapt by
39% in the first two decades of this century, agricultural emissions also rose
by 14%.
At the Cop28 climate summit in December, the FAO published the third in a
series of studies of the livestock emissions problem. As well as reducing the
FAO’s estimate of livestock’s contribution to overall global heating for a
third consecutive time, it used a paper written by Behrens and others in 2017
to argue that shifts away from meat eating could only reduce global agri-food
emissions by between 2 and 5%.
Behrens’s paper from 2017 assessed the environmental impacts of
government-backed nationally recommended diets (NRDs) of the time, which have
since become outdated. Many countries, such as China and Denmark, have
drastically reduced their recommended meat intake since then, while Germany now
proposes a 75% plant-based diet in its NRD.
Behrens says “voluminous evidence” from larger environmental reports which
recommended reductions in meat content, such as the Eat-Lancet Planetary Health
Diet, were ignored, according to the letter.
“The scientific consensus at the moment is that dietary shifts are the biggest
leverage we have to reduce emissions and other damage caused by our food
system,” Behrens told the
Guardian. “But the FAO chose the roughest and most
inappropriate approach to their estimates and framed it in a way that was very
useful for interest groups seeking to show that plant-based diets have a small
mitigation potential compared to alternatives.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
