The study also found that a food's country of origin can have huge consequences for its climate impact.
Achieving
a nutritious diet with adequate calories in developing countries will
require a substantial increase in greenhouse gas emissions and water
use, scientists reported Monday, calling on high-income countries to
accelerate the adoption of plant-heavy diets.
Researchers
at Johns Hopkins University developed a model looking at how changes
to dietary patterns across 140 countries would impact greenhouse
gas emissions and freshwater use at the individual and country
level, publishing their work in the journal Global Environmental
Change.
They
used the model to determine the per capita and countrywide climate
and water footprints of nine "plant-forward" diets, which
included no red meat, pescatarian, vegetarian without eliminating
eggs and dairy, vegan, and others.
Keeve
Nachman, the study's senior author, told AFP that much of the
conversation about mitigating the effects of climate
change "fails to recognise that many parts of the world are
dealing with undernutrition."
"In
order to get them to a place where they are not experiencing chronic
undernutrition, they'll need to eat more, and accordingly, they'll
need to increase their carbon footprint," he said.
"What
that says to us is that in many high-income countries around the
world, where we're consuming far more animal products than the global
average, there's an increased urgency to start transitioning sooner
rather than later towards some of these more plant-forward diets."
One
encouraging finding, said the scientists, was that this goal does not
necessarily require individuals to give up certain foods entirely.
Their
modeling showed for example that a diet in which animal protein came
mainly from low food chain animals, such as small fish and mollusks,
had nearly as low of an environmental impact as a vegan diet.
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