UN Latest Climate Change Report: Saving Planet Will Require ‘Drastic Changes’ in Land Use, Human Diets

agricultural land in Myanmar
Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP Photo

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on Thursday that calls for letting agricultural land return to the wilderness and for people to eat more plants and fewer animals.

The report reiterates the globalist organization’s claim that man’s use of natural resources to improve people’s lives around the world is making “global warming” worse and will make food more scarce, more expensive, and less nutritional.

“The cycle is accelerating,” NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, a co-author of the report, said in an Associated Press report. “The threat of climate change affecting people’s food on their dinner table is increasing.”

“But if people change the way they eat, grow food and manage forests, it could help save the planet from a far warmer future, scientists said,” AP wrote about the report, entitled “Climate Change and Land: an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.”

AP reported that the report was unanimously approved “by diplomats from nations around the world,” including the United States, and “proposed possible fixes and more dire warnings.”

“The stability of food supply is projected to decrease as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases,” the report said.

“Global crop and economic models project a median increase of 7.6 percent (range of 1 to 23 percent) in cereal prices in 2050 due to climate change, leading to higher food prices and increased risk of food insecurity and hunger,” the report said.

“If people change their diets, reducing red meat and increasing plant-based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and seeds, the world can save as much as another 15 percent of current emissions by mid-century. It would also make people more healthy,” NASA’s Rosenzweig said in the AP report.

“We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” Hans-Otto Pörtner, an ecologist who co-chairs the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, said in a Nature article on the report. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”

Nature reported:

Efforts to curb greenhouse gas-emissions and the impacts of global warming will fall significantly short without drastic changes in global land use, agriculture and human diets, leading researchers warn in a high-level report commissioned by the United Nations.

The report highlights the need to preserve and restore forests, which soak up carbon from the air, and peat lands, which release carbon if dug up. Cattle raised on pastures of cleared woodland are particularly emission-intensive, it says. This practice often comes with large-scale deforestation such as in Brazil or Colombia. Cows also produce large amount of methane, a potent greenhouse-gas, as they digest their food.

The report cautions that land must remain productive to feed a rising world population. Warming enhances plant growth in some regions, but in others ― including northern Eurasia, parts of North America, Central Asia and tropical Africa ― increasing water stress seems to reduce the rate of photosynthesis. So the use of biofuel crops and the creation of new forests― seen as measures with the potential to mitigate global warming ― must be carefully managed to avoid the risk of food shortage and biodiversity loss, the report says.

“It’s really exciting that the IPCC is getting such a strong message across,” Ruth Richardson, the Toronto, Canada-based executive director at the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, said in the Nature article. “We need a radical transformation, not incremental shifts, towards a global land use and food system that serves our climate needs.”

IPCC will be issuing another report on climate change and the ocean and ice sheets soon, according to Nature. The next climate change summit will take place in December in Santiago, Chile.

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