The UN’s leading authority on climate issues - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - has issued a stark warning against measures that seem a good idea at first, but can actually be counterproductive. Some of these ‘maladaptive mitigations’ are, unsurprisingly, linked to animal agriculture. Claire Hamlett reports.

On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the second chapter of its sixth report on the impacts of climate change. The situation is frankly dire. Almost half the world’s population is living in areas that are “highly vulnerable”; ecosystems are already being damaged beyond repair; the threat to food and water security for millions of people is intensifying. But the report also lays out the options for mitigation and adaptation, as well as warning against the harmful forms that these can take. On the one hand, there is ‘maladaptation’ - adaptation measures that “lead to an increase in the climate vulnerability of a system, sector or group” - and on the other there is ‘maladaptive mitigation’ - measures to reduce emissions that aren’t actually beneficial because they have unintended consequences.

According to the report, the most serious emerging cases of maladaptive mitigation are “between land-based approaches to mitigation and the protection of biodiversity”. It highlights tree-planting and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) as two such approaches that could have negative consequences, as explained in this Carbon Brief summary of the report. But cases of maladaptive mitigation can be found in many other contexts as well, including animal agriculture. Here are three examples of measures that may reduce emissions from animal agriculture slightly but will hinder the significant reductions that can only be achieved by a widespread shift to a plant-based food system.

1. Anaerobic digesters

Farming animals produces a lot of manure. Some of it gets deposited directly onto the ground by grazing animals, but in intensive farming systems, it needs to be dealt with in other ways, such as being stored in pits or sprayed onto fields as slurry. This causes significant pollution, especially when it runs off into waterways, and can emit large amounts of greenhouse gases. 

Increasingly, all that poop, along with so-called energy crops and some food waste, is being turned into ‘biogas’ in anaerobic digesters (ADs) and used for energy and as fuel. In the U.S., expanding the biogas industry is currently part of President Biden’s climate action plan, and federal and state agencies have given millions in subsidies for the development of ADs. In the UK, the amount of gas produced in ADs almost doubled between 2015 and 2020. 

But ADs are far from the climate and energy solution that their proponents say they are. As they increase in number and size, ADs are being used to alleviate concerns from planning authorities about the waste generated by proposed new intensive poultry and pig farms, creating further industrialization of the countryside and subjecting communities to all the associated impacts. As animals just keep on pooping, their manure is promoted as 'renewable', helping to both greenwash and entrench industrial animal agriculture. They will also do nothing to reduce the number of animals subjected to intensive farming conditions, nor the amount of land used to grow feed for them, nor the toll that takes on wildlife through pesticide use and habitat destruction.

2. Feed additives and face masks for cows

Animal agriculture accounts for about a third of global methane emissions, with cows being a major source. Because methane is such a powerful greenhouse gas, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, which co-produced the Global Methane Assessment in 2021, said: “Cutting methane is the strongest lever we have to slow climate change over the next 25 years.” The meat industry has responded by developing methods to reduce the methane content of cow burps through feed additives and face masks.

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Like ADs, these ‘fixes’ enable meat producers to make, or claim they are making, emissions reductions. But it’s unclear whether they can do this at scale, or in a sustainable manner. Seaweed has been touted as a great way to cut methane emissions from cows, but scientists have warned that it would need to be cultivated on a large-scale, potentially causing ecological problems. Other additives, meanwhile, are less effective at cutting methane content than seaweed. Moreover, since they are additives, they would be used in the context of feedlots and other industrial farming systems, entrenching them and their other problems the same as ADs.

Some might think face masks are a better option. UK company Zelp, in partnership with Cargill, has developed a face mask for cows that will reportedly reduce methane emissions from their burps by 60 per cent. But at a possible cost of USD$80 per cow per year, it’s unclear that this is a realistic option for many farms.

3. Promoting local meat as climate-friendly

The catering for the last climate summit, COP26, which took place in Glasgow in November 2021, came with a carbon-labelled menu that quite strikingly demonstrated the fallacy of the narrative that eating local meat is better for the climate than going plant-based. Scottish beef is lauded as among the most sustainable beef in the world, yet the COP26 menu showed that a Scottish beef burger produced 3.3kg of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e), while the plant-based one only produced 0.2kg CO2e. According to WWF, to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement our meals need to produce less than 0.5kg Co2e each. In almost all cases, the math is plainly in favour of plant-based options.

Yet the ‘eat local meat’ narrative has been latched onto by parts of the media, the meat industry as well as governments. The Scottish government has a ‘Climate Scheme’ to help cattle farmers reduce their emissions, but it explicitly says it doesn’t want to reduce Scotland’s herd size. The UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), a semi-governmental body, promotes British meat as a sustainable choice. Similar messaging is prevalent in the US and elsewhere. Usually, it is animals grazed in extensive systems that are held up as the model of sustainability.

But the evidence shows that what you eat matters much more than how it’s produced, with almost all plant-based foods having a lower impact across multiple measures. Even so-called sustainable meat will only gobble up more and more land, at great cost to wildlife, unless there is a huge drop in meat production. Policy intervention and changes in subsidies are necessary for bringing about a shift to a low-carbon plant-based food system. Governments promoting local meat as sustainable are doing so at the expense of the changes we actually need to cut emissions.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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