Strong and rapid greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions, far beyond those currently committed to, are required to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. This allows no sector to maintain business as usual practices, while application of the precautionary principle requires avoiding a reliance on negative emission technologies. Animal to plant-sourced protein shifts offer substantial potential for GHG emission reductions. Unabated, the livestock sector could take between 37% and 49% of the GHG budget allowable under the 2°C and 1.5°C targets, respectively, by 2030. Inaction in the livestock sector would require substantial GHG reductions, far beyond what are planned or realistic, from other sectors. This outlook article outlines why animal to plant-sourced protein shifts should be taken up by the Conference of the Parties (COP), and how they could feature as part of countries’ mitigation commitments under their updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to be adopted from 2020 onwards. The proposed framework includes an acknowledgment of ‘peak livestock’, followed by targets for large and rapid reductions in livestock numbers based on a combined ‘worst first’ and ‘best available food’ approach. Adequate support, including climate finance, is needed to facilitate countries in implementing animal to plant-sourced protein shifts.
Key policy insights
Given the livestock sector’s significant contribution to global GHG emissions and methane dominance, animal to plant protein shifts make a necessary contribution to meeting the Paris temperature goals and reducing warming in the short term, while providing a suite of co-benefits.
Without action, the livestock sector could take between 37% and 49% of the GHG budget allowable under the 2°C and 1.5°C targets, respectively, by 2030.
Failure to implement animal to plant protein shifts increases the risk of exceeding temperate goals; requires additional GHG reductions from other sectors; and increases reliance on negative emissions technologies.
COP 24 is an opportunity to bring animal to plant protein shifts to the climate mitigation table.
Revised NDCs from 2020 should include animal to plant protein shifts, starting with a declaration of ‘peak livestock’, followed by a ‘worst first’ replacement approach, guided by ‘best available food’.
Information on past and likely future trends in water temperature from different parts of the world is collated. The potential causes of trends in the thermal regimes of streams and rivers are many, but the existing database of water temperature information is inadequate to provide a global perspective on changes during the recent, let alone the more remote, past. Data from Europe suggest that warming of up to ca. 1°C in mean river temperatures has occurred during the 20th century, but that this trend has not been continuous, is distorted by extreme hydrological events, is not correlated with simple hydrometeorological factors and has been influenced by a variety of human activities. Predictive studies indicate that an accelerated rise in stream and river temperatures will occur during the next century as a consequence of global warming. However, forecasts must be tentative because future climatic conditions are uncertain and interactions between climate, hydrological and vegetation changes are complex. 相似文献
1 Introduction The annual mean world temperature increased by about 0.6℃ from the late 1800s to the 1980s (Wang, 1994). The global environmental change is marked with “global warming” and its possible effects on the ecosystem as well as the production … 相似文献
This article studies the response of the distribution pattern and the physiological characteristics of the ecosystem to the spontaneous precipitation and the interaction between vegetation and the atmosphere on multiple scales in arid and semi-arid zones, based on measured data of the ecological physiological parameters in the Ordas Plateau of northern China. The results show that the vegetation biomass and the energy use efficiency of photosynthesis are especially sensitive to the annual precipitation; strong and complex interactions exist between the vegetation and the atmosphere on multiple scales leading to supernormal thermal heterogeneity of the underlying surface, the strong vortex movement and turbulence. This study can facilitate understanding of the land surface processes and the influences of global climate change as well as human activities on the human environment in the arid and semi-arid zones. It also aids in improving the parameterization schemes of turbulent fluxes of a heterogeneous underlying surface for land surface processes in climate models. 相似文献
Journal of Geographical Sciences - Under the impacts of climate change and human activities, great uncertainties still exist in the response of climate extremes, especially in Central Asia (CA). In... 相似文献
The variability in global oceanic evaporation data sets was examined for the period 1988-2000. These data sets are satellite estimates based on bulk aerodynamic formulations and include the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Satellite-based Surface Turbulent Flux version 2 ( GSSTF2), the Japanese-ocean flux using remote sensing observations (J-OFURO), and the Hamburg Ocean-Atmosphere Parameters and Fluxes from Satellite version 2 (HOAPS2). The National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis is also included for comparison. An increase in global average surface latent heat flux (SLHF) can be observed in all the data sets. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) shows long-term increases that started around 1990 for all remote sensing data sets. The effect of Mt. Pinatubo eruption in 1991 is clearly evident in HOAPS2 but is independent of the longterm increase. Linear regression analyses show increases of 9.4%, 13.0%, 7. 3%, and 3.9% for GSSTF2, J-OFURO, HOAPS2 and NCEP, for the periods of the data sets. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analyses show that the pattern of the first EOF of all data sets is consistent with a decadal variation associated with the enhancement of the tropical Hadley circulation, which is supported by other satellite observations. The second EOF of all four data sets is an ENSO mode, and the correlations between their time series and an SO1 are 0.74, 0.71,0.59, and 0.61 for GSSTF2, J-OFURO, HOAPS2, and NCEP in that order. When the Hadley modes are removed from the remote sensing data, the residue global increases are reduced to 2.2% , 7. 3%, and 〈 1% for GSSTF2, J-OFURO and HOAPS, respectively. If the ENSO mode is used as a calibration standard for the data sets, the Hadley mode is at least comparable to, if not larger than, the ENSO mode during our study period. 相似文献