What the latest IPCC Report says about food, land and climate change

Towards a new climate scrappiness

Apr 07, 2022

Shaban Mwinji, a community scout ranger, in Ukunda, Kenya, stands in a restored Mangrove Forest. Credit: Anthony Ochieng / Climate Visuals Countdown...

On Monday April 4, the IPCC released its latest report, Mitigation of Climate Change. The press conference opened with the UN Secretary General calling countries increasing fossil fuel production “dangerous radicals,” and closed with a “deflection” to this question posed by Sarah Kaplan of The Washington Post: Which political players are the main obstacles to action? But in the middle, the authors hit the highlights of the report, approaching the need for systemic change with both urgency and a hard-nosed practicality.

Towards a new climate scrappiness. As others have said, the climate science isn’t exactly new at this point. It’s not news that a shift towards eating more plants and fewer ruminant animals will reduce emissions. With this report, the attention now shifts to the how. How can we effectively and practically deploy solutions, even or especially when there are barriers to policy action?

The underlying theme of the report seems to be a new kind of climate scrappiness: individuals, cities and groups can band together to take action when national governments can’t or won’t pass meaningful policies. Lack of action at the federal level has galvanized local and sub-national governments, said IPCC co-author Leon Clarke on a panel hosted by journalist Andrew Revkin.

One specific example: Washington, DC passed the Green Food Purchasing Amendment Act in 2020, committing to purchasing more plant-based foods to reduce emissions. And through climate litigation, activists have been able to push governments towards more ambitious climate policy.

Photo credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT). Ongoing work at CIAT's headquarters in Colombia, to measure the greenhouse gas emissions of rice production. The project is funded by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

We need to be spending a lot more on research aimed at deployment. Many of the solutions in the report have limitations. Carbon sequestration in soils might increase the amount of carbon underground, but the increase doesn’t last, for example. There are sustainable agriculture methods that are excellent for soil health but require a lot more land to produce the same amount of food (remember, land has a climate cost). Producing cultured or lab-grown meat at scale would be very expensive. But instead of trying to make any of these the one holy grail of solutions, governments should be expanding research with an eye towards deployment — rigorously and transparently testing, measuring and reporting on what these solutions can and can’t do right now.

The true cost of shifting to a plant-based diet. Switching to a plant-based diet would not only reduce emissions, as the report notes, but free up three billion hectares of agricultural land, some of which could be rewilded to store carbon, which is another important path to climate mitigation. But the IPCC declined to quantify costs associated with this shift in one of its models, leaving the figure grey:

We need a new model for evaluating the cost of climate action. So, maybe, we need a shift in how we think about the cost of climate action. According to co-author Leon Clarke, the problem with current climate models is they tie costs to the present rather than the future. For example, the cost of scaling cultured proteins is very high right now as compared to factory farmed meat, but the model should take into account the perhaps much larger cost of adapting our livestock-based system to a warming planet, a planet where bird flu outbreaks might become more common.

Healthier diets mitigate climate emissions. Despite the never-ending debate over on #HealthTwitter about what the research on red meat shows and doesn’t show, it really shouldn’t be controversial to advise eating just a little less beef. In the US, we already eat too much. Americans eating a little less beef will not put the beef industry out of business nor will it end animal agriculture thanks to growing population numbers. Eating “mostly plants” is good for your health, as the IPCC and other reports suggest, and eating more lentils, beans and whole grains is both more sustainable and healthy.

Mass tree planting campaigns can’t be a substitute for reducing emissions. Restoring degraded peatlands, forests and savannas are crucial, both for storing more carbon in land and protecting biodiversity but these have to be well-managed efforts. The report also warns that offsets can’t take the place of reductions. It kind of goes back to the same thing climate researchers have been saying for a long time now: we need to be doing it all and we need to start yesterday.

Here’s one action we can all take right now. One really really simple thing you can right now is to just eat less beef. It’s not a systemic change — it would do nothing to address water pollution from hog CAFOs or save chickens from slaughter — but it at least begins to tackle one of the biggest sources of methane emissions: ruminant animals who belch methane. Climate scientists are only asking you to eat a little less beef, around 1.5 burgers each week.

If you have questions about the report, hit this button and:

Hits and Misses: What I cooked for my non-vegan family this week

Hits. So I’m a little bit proud of this one. I made a rice bowl and used up leftover sweet potatoes, plus quick pickled some cucumbers and onions as one does, stir-fried mushrooms in sesame oil and garlic, threw in a frozen onion “bird’s nest” appetizer from Trader Joes for kicks and, finally, browned up Impossible meat in a soy-gojuchang sauce (soy sauce — maybe 1/2 cup?, heaping tablespoon gojuchang paste, maybe two tablespoons sesame oil, about a tablespoon sugar and then reduce in the pan or wok before you add Impossible meat).

Misses. A pea puree that we shall not speak of.