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Eating through the carbon budget

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In the media
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Food related emissions will take up our entire carbon budget by 2050 if we don’t change our diets and the way our food is produced, blowing any chance of meeting the raised ambition of the Paris Agreement. That is the conclusion of University of Leeds professor of population ecology Tim Benton and Dr Bojana Bajželj of WRAP, writing in a guest post for Carbon Brief (23.03.16), who say that agri-food already accounts for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and that the sector was largely ignored when the agreement to work towards a 1.5C target was made.

The authors examine the consequences for global emissions and options for reducing them set against a growing world population, decreasing crop yields and concomitant change of land use, resulting in loss of carbon sinks.

Read the article here.