Claims & Substantiation
EPISODE: BACKSTAGE
“Eating more plant-based foods is one of the best ways to lower your climate impact”
EPISODE: NOT JUST FOR HIPSTERS
“Anyone can eat plant-based if they feel like being more sustainable and helping the planet out.”
SUBSTANTIATION & REFERENCES
- Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-992. (With additional calculations for the BBC’s food calculator provided by J. Poore on oat drink, almond milk, and rice milk.) https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216
- World Resources Institute (WRI) (2019). Creating a Sustainable Food Future. A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050. How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21 Charts | World Resources Institute (wri.org)
“Shift to healthier, more sustainable diets. Consumption of ruminant meat (beef, lamb and goat) is projected to rise 88 percent between 2010 and 2050. Beef, the most commonly consumed ruminant meat, is resource- intensive to produce, requiring 20 times more land and emitting 20 times more GHGs per gram of edible protein than common plant proteins, such as beans, peas and lentils. Limiting ruminant meat consumption to 52 calories per person per day by 2050—about 1.5 hamburgers per week—would reduce the GHG mitigation gap by half and nearly close the land gap. In North America this would require reducing current beef and lamb consumption by nearly half. Actions to take include improving the marketing of plant-based foods, improving meat substitutes and implementing policies that favor consumption of plant-based foods.” - Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Actions to Transform Food Systems Under Climate Change.pdf (cgiar.org)
“ACTION 3.1 Shift to healthy and sustainable climate- friendly diets CHALLENGE 3.1: Incentivize dramatic reductions in beef and dairy consumption in 15 high- and middle-income countries and all C40 cities by 2030” “WHY: Consumption of beef and dairy is the largest single driver of agricultural GHGs globally. Beef production contributes 2.9 Gt CO2 e/yr or 41% of total agricultural emissions, while dairy contributes about 1.4 Gt CO2 e/yr or 20%. 114 More climate-friendly protein sources are available: for 100 grams of protein, there are wide differences among protein sources, but also within a single protein source there is a wide range for production efficiency, as indicated by the 10th and 90th percentiles in Figure 12, suggesting that dietary shifts and increased production efficiency can make major changes in emissions.”
EPISODE: NORM’S OLD PAL MILK
Milk character: “You know what people are saying about me these days...
It’s all high carbon emissions this and, ehe, bad for the planet that...”
SUBSTANTIATION & REFERENCES
In general [or on average] animal-based products have a higher environmental [or climate] impact than plant-based products.
a) Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental
impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-
992. (With additional calculations for the BBC’s food calculator
provided by J. Poore on oat drink, almond milk, and rice milk.)