During the late 90s and early 2000s the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon averaged about 20,000 square kilometers per year, driven by the rapid expansion of cattle pasture and the commercial soybean industry. Then, starting around 2005, it began to drop rapidly, falling by 70% in just half a dozen years. This dramatic drop cut Brazil’s national global warming emissions very substantially, in addition to having important benefits for biodiversity and for the people of the Amazon basin.

Since then – essentially no net change. There have been small fluctuations up and down in the annual measurements of deforestation (up in three years and down in three years, to be specific) but it remains at basically the same level. In 2017 the annual loss of Amazon forest was 6,947 km2; that compares to 6,418 km2 in 2011.

Why is this surprising? Because in the same period, Brazilian politics has been incredibly chaotic. To cite the most striking developments during this turbulent period: one President has been impeached and removed from office; an ex-President (during whose administration the decrease in deforestation was achieved) has been jailed and prevented from running again; and politicians across the political spectrum have been implicated in the corruption scandal known as “Lava Jato” – or Car Wash. Not to mention a major economic depression, the passage of legislation weakening of Brazil’s Forest Code, and the indictment of the world’s largest meatpacking company, JBS S.A., on charges relating both to deforestation and to selling tainted meat.

Why then, did deforestation remain essentially the same?

While there are many factors involved, the lack of change does seem to reflect the institutionalization of the reasons that caused deforestation to drop in the earlier period. These include regulations (and prosecutions) limiting the sale of beef and soy from deforested areas; increased transparency concerning who is deforesting and to whom they’re selling their beef and soy; improvements in efficiency which allowed farmers and ranchers to raise output without clearing more land; and underlying these, the development of a political movement, led by Brazilian NGOs, that made deforestation an important issue in national politics.

If the lack of change in deforestation is interesting, so is the way that the international media have covered it. My co-author Dora Chi and I reviewed news stories on Amazon deforestation (using Lexis-Nexis; our search found 134 print articles from 2013 through 2017) and discovered a common theme: the idea that although deforestation had fallen in earlier years, now it had gone back up. As our review showed, even though this interpretation isn’t borne out by the data, it was nonetheless quite frequently used in the media narratives about deforestation.

Perhaps this mis-interpretation simply reflects a common journalistic tendency to write “on the one hand… but on the other hand…” stories. Or maybe it’s that you can’t get a story into print if it says that there’s nothing new. It may also reflect our tendency to present data such as deforestation rates as percentages, without realizing how they can be misleading because they’re using different denominators. A quick example – if my income dropped by 50% last year, then turned around and increased by 50% this year – am I now back to where I was two years ago? No – I’m actually still 25% below that level.

So, both the lack of change in the data, and the mis-communication of its stability in the media, are notable phenomena. But there’s a third (non-)event worth noting, and that’s the fact that deforestation hasn’t dropped to zero, as it would have if the earlier trend had continued. This is a major failure in terms of its effect on climate change and efforts to reign in global emissions. It shows that Brazil’s political turbulence has had important consequences for the global environment.

Recently I was looking at some data about world food production on the excellent Our World in Data site, and I discovered something very simple, but very surprising about the world’s population. We often hear (and I used to teach) about the threat of an exponentially growing population and the pressure it is supposed to be putting on our food supply and the natural resources that sustain it (land, water, nutrients, etc). But I found that the global population isn’t growing exponentially, and hasn’t been for at least half a century.

It has actually been growing in a simpler way than exponentially—in a straight line.

What exponential growth is

Exponential growth (sometimes also called geometric or compound-interest growth) can be described by an equation in which time is raised to a power, i.e. has an exponent—hence the name. But it also can be described in simpler terms: the growth rate of the population, as a fraction of the population’s size, is a constant. Thus, if a population has a growth rate of 2%, and it remains 2% as the population gets bigger, it’s growing exponentially. And there’s nothing magic about the 2; it’s growing exponentially whether that growth rate is 2% or 10% or 0.5% or 0.01%.

Another way to put it is that the doubling time of the population—the number of years it takes to grow to twice its initial size—is also a constant. So, if the population will double in the next 36 years, and double again in the following 36 years, and so on, then it’s growing exponentially. There’s even a simple rule-of-thumb relationship between doubling time and the percentage growth rate: Doubling Time = 72/(Percentage Growth Rate). So that population with a 36 year doubling time, is growing at a rate of 2% per year.

But probably the simplest way to describe exponential growth is with a graph, so here’s how it looks:

Figure 1. Exponential growth versus linear (straight-line) growth.

This graphic not only shows the classic upward-curving shape of the exponential growth curve, but also how it contrasts with growth that is linear, i.e. in a straight line. Additionally, it demonstrates a simple mathematical result: if one quantity is growing exponentially and a second quantity is growing linearly, the first quantity will eventually become larger than the second, no matter what their specific starting points or rates of growth.

This isn’t just abstract math; it also illustrates the most famous use of exponential growth in political debate. It was put forward by the English parson Robert Malthus over two centuries ago. He argued that the human population grows exponentially while food production can only grow linearly. Thus, it follows inevitably that the population will eventually outgrow the food supply, resulting in mass starvation. This is the case even if the food supply is initially abundant and growing rapidly (but linearly). The upward-bending-curve of an exponentially-growing population will always overtake it sooner or later, resulting in catastrophe.

Looking at real data

Critics ever since Malthus’ time have pointed out that his assumption that food production grows in a straight line is just that—an assumption, with little basis in theory. So I wasn’t surprised to see that the OWID data showed faster-than-linear (upward-curving) growth in global food production over the past half-century. What did surprise me was that the growth of the world’s population over that time period has actually been very close to a straight line.

Here’s that graph:

Figure 2. World population growth from 1961 to 2016, from the official U.N. figures. The data are expressed as an index, with the 1961 population = 100. To convert the index to actual numbers of people, just multiply the index value by 30,830,000, since the world population in 1961 was 3.083 billion.

The graph looks very much like a straight line rather than the upward-curving exponential, but is that really the case? We can test this by calculating the value of what statisticians call the R² (or “coefficient of determination”) for this curve. The closer it is to a straight line, the higher R² will be, and if the data fits a straight line perfectly then R² will be exactly 1.0.

So, what’s the actual value for this data? It’s 0.9992. I.e. the fit to a straight line isn’t quite perfect, but it’s very, very close.

Is this some sort of artifact?

I was actually quite surprised at how well the data fit a straight line—so much so that I wondered if this was just an artifact of the method I used, rather than a real result. So I applied the same method—plot the data, fit a straight line to it, and calculate the value of R²—to the data for some of the world’s largest countries and regions, rather than the world as a whole.

For several of these, the lines looked very straight and the value of R² was almost as high as in the graph for the world as a whole, or even slightly higher, e.g.:

But for others it was considerably lower (e.g. .9777 for China, .9668 for the European Union) and two graphs proved clearly that the excellent fit to a straight line is a real result, not an artifact. These were the ones for Sub-Saharan Africa and Russia:

Figure 3. Population growth of Sub-Saharan Africa from 1961 to 2016, from the official U.N. figures available at ourworldindata.org. The data are expressed as an index, with the 1961 population = 100. Thin dotted line shows the best-fit straight line; thick dots show the actual data.

Figure 3. Population growth of Russia from 1961 to 2016, from the official U.N. figures available at ourworldindata.org. The data are expressed as an index, with the 1961 population = 100. Thin dotted line shows the best-fit straight line; thick dots show the actual data.

The point about the Sub-Saharan African graph is not simply that it has a lower value of R² (0.964), but that its data deviates from the straight line in the way that an exponential curve should: higher than the straight line at the lowest and the highest time values, and lower than the straight line at the intermediate ones. It does fit an exponential curve quite well, thus showing that the method can pick out an exponential curve if the data do follow one. But this is the only region or large country for which that’s actually true.

The Russia graph doesn’t fit an exponential curve well at all—it actually curves downward overall, rather than upward as it should if it were an exponential—but it does show that the value of R² can be much lower than 1.0 for real data. For Russia it’s 0.632. So as with the Sub-Saharan Africa case, it proves that the high value of R² for the world as a whole is not an artifact caused by the method. It reflects the reality of the past 55 years.

Finally, since I and many of my readers are from the United States, here’s that graph:

For the US as for the whole world, population growth over the past half-century has been quite close to a straight line; the R² is 0.9956.

A direct test of whether growth is exponential

These graphs and R² values seem to indicate that linear growth is the best model for the world population over the past 55 years, but there’s another way to show that it’s not exponential. As I said above, exponential growth occurs when the percentage growth rate remains constant as the population gets bigger. So a simple test is to graph the percentage growth rate over time, and see whether it’s a constant—i.e., a horizontal line. So here’s that graph:

Figure 6. Percentage growth rate of the world population from 1961 to 2016, calculated from the official U.N. figures available at ourworldindata.org. The trend lines goes downward over time, rather than being horizontal as it would if the percentage were a constant.

This result, like the others, is quite clear. The percentage growth rate is not a constant, as it should be if the population were growing exponentially. Rather, it has been dropping steadily over the past half-century, from over 2.0% in the early sixties to below 1.2% now.

What exponential growth is Not

So, we should stop saying that the world’s population is growing exponentially. That hasn’t been the case for at least 50 years. Exponential growth clearly doesn’t describe the global reality of the twenty-first century.

But there’s actually a second reason to stop saying that the global population is growing exponentially, and that’s because the term is so commonly misused and misunderstood. Note the next few times that you hear someone use the word, and I think you’ll find that it’s not being used in the sense of “constant percentage-growth-rate” or “constant doubling-time” or even just “an upward-bending curve.” Rather, it’s being used—often with an emphatic stress on the “-nen-” syllable and an implicit exclamation mark at the end of the phrase—to mean “rapidly” or “quickly” or “fast” or “big.”

That way of speaking is common, but it’s also just plain wrong. Remember the example that I started with: the exponential growth rate can be high (e.g. 10%) or low (e.g. 0.01%) or intermediate (e.g. 2%). In every case it’s exponential growth, but it’s very fast exponential growth if the growth rate is 10% and very slow exponential growth if it’s 0.01%.

I’m not that sanguine about getting people to go back to using “exponential” in its correct sense, but I think it’s at least worth a try. After all, we already have several other good words for that other, incorrect meaning—e.g. “fast” or “big.”

Implications

The results don’t just imply that we should talk about population growth differently, but also that we need to re-think how it relates to food production. There is good news in these data, because they show that hunger and environmental catastrophe is not at all inevitable. Malthus’ argument just doesn’t fit reality.

While linear growth has its challenges, it’s far easier to deal with than exponential growth. The distinction between growing exponentially and growing in a straight line does matter. On that point, at least, Malthus got it right.

Now, half a century later, food waste has grown from family stories into a worldwide policy issue. A common estimate is that 40% of food is wasted. Scientific papers analyze consumers’ feelings about the sensory and social qualities of meals, and reducing waste is becoming just as much a concern as local, organic, and community-supported. This issue is critical. Yet an important part of the food waste problem remains unseen.

This additional waste involves not the food that is thrown out because no one eats it—but the food we do eat.

Recent studies by an international group of researchers led by Peter Alexander of the University of Edinburgh have shown just how important this additional kind of waste is. Alexander and his colleagues have published a series of papers that give detailed, quantitative analyses of the global flows of food, from field to fork and on into the garbage can. The results are striking. Only 25% of harvested food, by weight, is consumed by people. (Measuring food by its energy values in calories or by the amount of protein it contains, rather than by its dry weight, does increase the numbers but only a bit—to 32% and 29% respectively.)

But beyond these overall figures, Alexander and colleagues point to the importance of two kinds of waste in the ways in which we do eat our food, but in an extremely inefficient way. One is termed “over-consumption,” defined as food consumption in excess of nutritional requirements. (For the purposes of this discussion, I am referring to food consumption in excess of caloric requirements. However, it is critical to note that calories consumed only tells a small part of the story. A complete analysis would include the quality of the foods consumed and the many systemic reasons why we “over-consume”—including the structure of the food industry, the affordability of and access to processed foods relative to healthier foods, etc. But that is the subject for several books, not one blog post.)

Even using a generous definition of how much food humans require—e.g. 2342 kcals/person/day, compared to the 2100 kcal used in other studies—Alexander et al. find that over-consumption is at least comparable in size to the amount of food that consumers throw out (“consumer waste”). This is show in the graphic below, in which in each column, the uppermost part of each bar (in dark purple) represents over-consumption and the second-to-the-top section (light purple) shows consumer waste.

Losses of harvested crops at different stages of the global food system. The four columns represent different ways to measure the amount of food: from left to right, by dry weight, calories, protein, and wet weight. Source: Figure 4 of Alexander et al., 2017, Agricultural Systems; DOI: 10.1016/j.agsy.2017.01.014.

So, it turns out that for many people, reducing consumption could improve health while also potentially saving food and therefore also the many resources that go into growing and distributing it.

But neither overconsumption nor consumer waste are the largest way we waste the resources that can be used to produce food. That turns out to be livestock production—the dark red sections in the graphic above. Livestock are an extremely inefficient way of transforming crops (which they use as feed) into food for humans, with loss rates ranging from 82% (in terms of protein) up to 94% (by dry weight) once all of the feed they consume during their lifespans is considered. It’s not food that goes into our garbage or landfills, but it represents an enormous loss to the potential global supply of food for people just the same.

The reasons have to do with ecology: when we eat one level higher on the food web we’re losing about 90% of the edible resources from the level below.

Achieving the ultimate goals of reducing food waste—for example, reduced environmental consequences and ensuring more people have access to foods that meet their nutritional requirements—of course will require additional and critical steps. For example, additional food doesn’t help if it isn’t nutritious or can’t be accessed by the people who need it. Also, spared land doesn’t help if that land isn’t managed in a way that contributes to a healthier environment. However, thinking more about all types of food waste can help us to find better ways to protect our natural resources while producing and distributing healthy food for all.

The results of these new analyses should expand what we think of when we hear the words “food waste.” Yes, it includes the food we buy but don’t eat—the vegetables we leave on our plates and the bananas we throw into the compost bin—and it’s very important to develop habits and policies to reduce this waste. But we also need to confront the wastefulness in what we do eat, by asking: how much and what kind of food should we be buying in the first place?

A new scientific paper, published two weeks ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Bronson Griscom and colleagues, will be extremely helpful in this task. (The multi-authored effort was led by The Nature Conservancy.) The paper’s title is “Natural climate solutions,” and it shows that changes in how we use forests, agricultural lands and wetlands can be a sizeable part of the solution. (Simplifying a bit, 37% of the solution by 2030, according to their calculations).

Among the many natural approaches that they evaluated, reforestation turns out to be one with the most potential (although also the largest uncertainty.) Here’s the key graphic summarizing the estimates:

The potential of 20 “natural climate solutions” by the year 2030, measured in PgCO2 per year. A Pg (petagram) is the same as a gigaton, i.e. a billion tons of carbon dioxide; current global greenhouse gas emissions total a bit over 50 gigatons of CO2/year. Solutions which also have benefits for the air, water, soil and biodiversity are indicated by the small colored bars just to the left of the vertical axis. Source: Figure 1 of B. Griscom et al. 2017, “Natural climate solutions”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1710465114

The second-largest potential lies in reducing deforestation (or as the graph calls it, “Avoided Forest Conversion”), which also has the greatest low-cost potential and the benefit of lowering emissions immediately, and the third is improving natural forest management. So in terms of climate potential, forests are fundamental. But both agriculture (e.g. biochar, trees in croplands) and wetlands (e.g. protecting high-carbon peat swamps and mangrove forests, which also are important as buffers against storms and flooding) can make appreciable contributions, too. Furthermore, most of the potential solutions offer benefits not only to the climate, but also in terms of water, air, soil and biodiversity.

One notable feature of the paper is that it’s conservative, in the best sense of that word. The estimates take as a basic premise that natural approaches should only be implemented with safeguards for food security, biodiversity and people’s rights and livelihoods. Thus, for example, the calculations for reforestation assume that it will done using native species and only be implemented on grazing lands that were previously forested, so that afforestation of croplands and of natural grasslands is excluded. “Solutions” whose technical feasibility or social impact are questionable—e.g. Biological Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) or no-till crop production—are also excluded. And the authors go to great lengths (literally—there are over 90 pages of Supporting Information) to make sure that they’re not double-counting any of the potentials.

The paper does omit, at least in its explicit calculations, the kinds of solutions that involve changing how human societies consume rather than how we use nature to produce. In other words, the approaches it considers are supply-side ones, not demand-side ones such as changing our diets or reducing how much food we waste.

But the authors clearly realize the importance of consumption, and indeed they point out that the reforestation of grazing lands will have important impacts on livestock products, particularly beef. These effects could be of several kinds: shifting human diets away from beef, reducing herd sizes, improving the quality of cattle pastures or the nutritional value of their feed, and others. But what they have in common is that they would tend to reduce emissions of methane and nitrous oxide—both considerably more powerful greenhouse gases than CO₂—from beef cattle and their manure. So there’d be an additional benefit in terms of emissions reduction, in addition to large amounts of carbon that will be sequestered by the new forests.

Just as important as the paper’s demonstration that natural solutions can be an important part of solving the climate problem, is their emphasis that they can only work if accompanied by massive cuts in fossil fuel emissions. Here’s their graphic showing the scenario they envisage, which includes cutting greenhouse gases from fossil fuels by 93% by 2050:

The scenario combining a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel emissions with Natural Climate Solution (NCS) mitigation to keep global temperature increases less than 2 degrees C. above the pre-industrial level. Source: Figure 2 of B. Griscom et al. 2017, “Natural climate solutions”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; DOI:10.1073/pnas.1710465114

Combined with the natural climate solutions, this would achieve the “negative emissions” needed to keep global warming below the 2 degrees C. recognized as dangerous for the future of humanity. And it would do it without using BECCS or other approaches whose feasibility and acceptability remains to be seen.

The critical but at the same time secondary role of natural solutions is the reason I wrote “(help)” in my title, despite my dislike of the post-modern fad for excessive parenthesization. With its conservative approach, the paper by Griscom et al. demonstrates that forests, agriculture and wetlands can’t solve the climate problem alone, but are nonetheless a critical part of an approach that can solve it. Thus, it’s a key step forward in how we think about, and what we do about, the most important environmental challenge of our time.

“When I read the post by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board concerning my blog about the importance of beef as the leading driver of deforestation, I recalled a lesson that I learned many, many years ago. I’m now 67 years old, which means that it has been more than six decades since my parents taught it to me. It was simple: when I did something wrong, I couldn’t excuse it by saying that someone else had done something worse. I had to take responsibility for my own actions, no matter what anyone else did.

As I explained in my original blog, new data shows the large role of beef production, particularly in Latin America, as a cause of tropical deforestation. Does this mean that we no longer need to be concerned about deforestation for oil palm production in Malaysia? Does the climate impact of deforestation in the Amazon mean that the destruction of peat swamps in southeast Asia no longer causes any global warming pollution? Does the threat to jaguars and tapirs in South America somehow protect orangutans and rhinos on the other side of the planet?

Of course not. The threats to the environment, the climate and biodiversity from oil palm production in Malaysia are not diminished in the least by the parallel threats from beef production in the Americas. One does not excuse the other. On the contrary, they combine to make the global danger even worse.

This kind of argument is similar to something we’ve been seeing in recent weeks in Washington, which goes by the name “what-about-ism.” When the new government does something egregious on one issue, instead of defending its actions it responds by attacking its critics on some other issue. For example: the courts have found the current administration’s ban on immigrants from Muslim countries to be unconstitutional—well, what about the previous administration’s deportations of immigrants from Mexico?

Few of us have found this kind of blame-shifting persuasive, and I doubt the Malaysian Palm Oil Board’s arguments about beef will be any more convincing. Environmental destruction in one part of the world doesn’t justify it in any other part of the world, whether it’s larger, smaller, or simply different. The destruction of tropical forests by all the drivers of deforestation—beef, palm oil, soy and timber—is a threat to the climate that we all depend on, and thus to people everywhere.”

You may wonder why this comment is posted here rather than on the MPOC web site to which it’s replying. The answer is, because they wouldn’t post it. I submitted this comment on their blog site on Monday, March 13, in full anticipation that it would be published immediately, and when it wasn’t, I sent a followup message two days later asking what was causing the delay. But it’s now a month later and nothing has happened. The comment hasn’t been posted, nor has there even been the courtesy of a reply. That’s why it’s here.

As Oscar Night approaches, I’ve gotten to thinking about the movies I saw last year—not just the good ones, but a bad one too. It’s Inferno, which seemed to have everything going for it, but has sunk into cinematic oblivion with scarcely a trace. Why?

Before I saw it last fall, I thought it had all the elements that would make lots of Americans like it—including me. It stars Tom Hanks, the actor who would definitely be America’s Sweetheart if he weren’t so old and so male. It’s directed by Ron Howard, one of Hollywood’s most respected directors. Its title and underlying theme come from Dante’s description of Hell—seven centuries old but still unsurpassed.

Dante—a portrait by Andrea del Castagno, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Source: Web_Gallery_of_Art, Wikimedia.org

And it’s based on the best-selling novel by best-selling author Dan Brown of DaVinci Code fame. Put those four together, and how could we fail to like it? For that matter, how could I fail to like it? (OK, I’m not a Dan Brown fan, but Hanks, Howard and Dante are all favorites of mine, so three out of four…)

Well, even with all that going for it, there’s no way it’ll be mentioned Sunday night. In fact I suspect that Tom Hanks and Ron Howard would just as soon we forget they ever were associated with it. (Not sure about how Dan Brown or Dante are feeling). The critics’ consensus, as summarized by the Rotten Tomatoes web site, is “Senselessly frantic and altogether shallow, Inferno sends the Robert Langdon trilogy spiraling to a convoluted new low.” Ouch! And even more painful, Hollywood-wise, it made only $34 million at the box office. I.e., a total flop.

How could it fail so badly? I thought briefly that it might have to do with the plot and the villain. (Spoiler ahead, although frankly it’s so far past its sell-by date that this can’t make it worse.) Inferno’s evil genius turns out to be a millionaire who thinks the world’s fundamental problem is … overpopulation. Through TED-like talks he builds up a cult of Malthusian followers who conspire with him to kill off half the world’s people for the sake of preserving nature.

So, was that the problem? Was seeing a twisted kind of environmentalist as the epitome of Evil just too much for American audiences to take? Is our fear of population growth so strong that we refuse to accept any negative portrayal of that fear? Just too much cognitive dissonance?

Nahhh…..I don’t think so. It’s easy for us intellectuals to overthink pop culture, and in this case I think there’s a simpler explanation. It’s just a bad movie. And as Dante’s contemporary William of Ockham taught us, there’s no need to come up with a complicated explanation when a simple one will do just fine.

So, on Sunday night I won’t be regretting the fact that Inferno’s not in the running for Best Picture. Personally I’m rooting for Hidden Figures. It had me right from the opening scene in which a young African-American girl is walking down a lane counting “….eight, nine, ten, prime, twelve, prime, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, prime…”

Just the nerd version of sentimentality? Sure, I admit it. But it’s also a great movie. And nowadays science can use all the help it can get from pop culture, so I’m really hoping it wins.

The key is a two-step process: Traceability and Transparency. First, corporations need to find out how their supply chains extend all the way back to the forest land from which they get the palm oil, wood, beef and soy that they use to make the products they sell us. But second, they need to make this information public, clearly and in detail. To borrow a phrase from a quite different issue, they need to Ask, but they also need to Tell.

This is what makes a new agreement among 18 NGOs (including UCS) on Reporting Guidance for Responsible Palm an important development. Palm oil—the most widely used vegetable oil worldwide, used in literally thousands of products from baked goods to shampoo to cooking oil to industrial lubricants—comes mostly from southeast Asia. Its production is associated with deforestation, the exploitation of workers and violations of the land rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the draining and burning of peat swamps that produces large-scale emissions of global warming pollution. Many companies have made commitments to end these practices, but till now there was no agreement on how they needed to report their progress in doing it.

The new guidelines, in whose development my UCS colleague Sharon Smith was deeply involved, are notable for their clarity and their comprehensiveness. As a veteran of negotiating processes for many documents, ranging from international treaties to political coalitions to the texts of multi-author scientific papers, I’ve seen lots of ways in which these processes can lead to weak outcomes, despite the best intentions of those involved. Two pitfalls are particularly common:

• Complicated jargon. Particularly when working on scientific and technical issues, we can easily lapse into using words that have precise meanings to experts, but are incomprehensible to the outside world.
• “Kitchen-sink” compromises. When one side thinks that point A is crucial, and another feels the same about point B—and others about C, D, E and F—the simplest way to reach agreement can seem to be: let’s just include them all.

The 18 organizations that created the Reporting Guidance have done an admirable job in avoiding these two traps. The text is written in plain English, e.g.

Furthermore, the guidelines include important points for transparency—both environmental and social—but nothing superfluous. The document covers what’s needed in just 16 pages, which includes a set of definitions and a two-page quantitative assessment of how many companies are already following each of the guidelines in their reporting.

Although I wasn’t involved in the negotiations leading to the guidelines, I know well how hard and exhausting it can be to reach agreement on such a document. But of course documents change nothing unless they’re implemented. In this case, that means that companies that have moved in the direction of zero-deforestation supply chains need to report publicly on their progress using this Guidance. (A few immediately announced that they will do so; e.g. Marks and Spencer, which said that “This document guides companies towards reporting that is most meaningful and material to a wide range of stakeholders and contributes towards our collective goal of making palm oil production sustainable and deforestation free.”

We now need to see similar statements from those corporations that haven’t yet done adequate reporting on how they are complying with their announced policies—e.g. McDonald’s, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, ConAgra, Krispy Kreme, Tim Hortons and Yum! Brands. It’s time to be transparent about how you’re ending deforestation from what you sell us.

The study, by Climate Focus and many collaborators, is part of an assessment of the impact of the New York Declaration on Forests two years ago. That Declaration, launched at the September 2014 Climate Summit that also featured a march of 400,000 people through the streets of New York, highlighted commitments by hundreds of companies, governments, NGOs, Indigenous Peoples’ groups and others to work towards a rapid end to deforestation. The Climate Focus report looked in particular at the Declaration’s “Goal 2”: “Support and help meet the private-sector goal of eliminating deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, paper, and beef products by no later than 2020, recognizing that many companies have even more ambitious targets.”

The September 2014 Climate March through the streets of New York, with yours truly on the left, helping to carry the UCS banner. The New York Declaration on Forests was launched just a few days later. Source: Doug Boucher, UCS.

In evaluating progress toward achieving Goal 2 by 2020, Climate Focus looked at the most recent data showing what are the main drivers of deforestation. Here’s the graphic that gives these results, from two different data analyses (on the left, from Henders et al. 2015; on the right, from European Commission 2013):

The main commodities driving deforestation, from the analysis of Climate Focus based on two different data sources. Source: Climate Focus 2016. http://climatefocus.com/publications/progress-new-york-declaration-forests-goal-2-assessment-report-update-goals-1-10

The data is pretty clear: by far the biggest driver of deforestation is beef. Soy is second, but far behind in terms of importance. And palm oil and wood products are even smaller drivers, causing only about a tenth as much deforestation as beef.

You’d expect that corporate priorities, as shown by their pledges to eliminate deforestation, should reflect the relative importance of these four drivers, at least approximately. But Climate Focus found that in fact, it’s the opposite. Here are the percentage of active companies that have made pledges concerning each of these four drivers:

• Palm Oil – 59%
• Wood Products – 53%
• Soy – 21%
• Beef – 12%

So, it’s not just that the percentage of commitments doesn’t reflect the importance of the drivers. It actually reverses them. The more important a commodity is, the less likely that a company will have pledged to eliminate the deforestation that it’s causing. We’re just three years away from the Declaration’s deadline, but only one out of eight corporations have even stated a pledge to reach that 2020 goal for what is the largest driver of deforestation by far.

The Climate Focus report goes into more depth about this, but in all honesty, and in a self-critical spirit, I have to admit that one reason that companies have emphasized palm oil and wood is that we NGOs have pushed them the hardest on those commodities. And the “we” here includes UCS, and me personally during most of the time that I directed UCS’ Tropical Forest and Climate Initiative (2007-2015).

Sure, we had good strategic reasons to focus on palm oil. Some of these were based on data—palm oil was growing rapidly in terms of global consumption, and was linked to the tropical peat clearance that releases large amounts of global warming pollution. Other reasons were more emotional—we could see that orangutans, which are threatened by the expansion of oil palm plantations, are incredibly cute and charismatic. But the end result was that we concentrated on getting corporate zero-deforestation commitments relating to crops that weren’t the main causes of deforestation.

In the last year UCS has changed the emphasis of its zero-deforestation campaigning to beef cattle and soybeans, and I’ve helped by pointing out its overwhelming importance in other reports that I’ve written. But looking backward, even though the companies can’t escape their fundamental responsibility for their own actions, pledges and priorities, we in the NGO community should have done better too.

This issue of misplaced priorities was made all the more poignant by the recent release of the past year’s annual data on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It’s not good news—almost 8,000 km² of forest were cleared from August 2015 to July 2016. Here is the data for the last two decades, from the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, INPE:

Annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, in km² per year (August through July). Source: INPE (Brazilian National Institute for Space Research): http://www.obt.inpe.br/prodes/index.php

You can see that this is the second year in a row, and the third of the past four years, that deforestation has risen. Although the level is still down about 60% from the average for the decade around the year 2000, the recent trend is in the wrong direction.

Why is this relevant to the issue of priorities? Simply because beef is by far the biggest driver of deforestation in the Amazon, and soy is the second. There are lots of factors related to the increase (e.g.  the political turmoil leading up to the impeachment of Brazil’s President Dilma Roussef and her removal from office in August) but it’s hard to argue that the lack of corporate commitments to ending Amazon deforestation was totally irrelevant.

I don’t want to go overboard with the mea culpa here. Companies have to take responsibility for their actions, and their lack of action. They can’t just say “the NGO community made me do it.” But the Climate Focus report and the new data from the Amazon demonstrate forcefully that when we get the priorities wrong, there are consequences.

At the annual climate negotiations going on in Marrakech, Morocco, various countries are presenting their visions of what they can do by 2050 to help achieve this goal, to which the world’s nations committed last year in Paris. Although the U.S. mid-century vision may be delayed because of the outcome of this week’s elections, we anticipate that when it comes out it will recognize how our forests can play a key role on the sequestration side—both preserving our current forest “sink”, which removes about three-quarters of a billion tons of CO₂ from the air each year, and by reforesting to increase that sink over the next three-plus decades.

As a politically engaged scientist I try to keep in mind both the current reality—i.e. the grave threat to climate action represented by the incoming Trump administration and the new Congress—and also the longer-term needs of the planet. There’ll be lots of opportunities, and lots of need, to talk about the short term dangers in coming weeks and months. But this post will be about the longer-term, with the hope that if we better understand what can and must be done in the next few decades, it’ll help us change political reality so that it can happen.

A bit of climate and a bit of history

Earlier this year I worked with my UCS colleagues Jason Funk and Stu Sheppard to examine the climate potential of U.S. forests by mid-century. We found that some of the things people often think about doing first, such as stopping forest fires and planting more trees, are not actually the biggest opportunities.

To understand why, let’s take a quick look at the climate and the history of American forests. Oversimplifying, but not that much, we can say that the Eastern U.S. is moist, while the West is dry. In New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Lake States, the South and a large part of the Midwest, we get about 40 inches (i.e. 1 meter) of precipitation annually, fairly evenly spread over all the months of the year. But as you travel west beyond the Mississippi, this diminishes steadily, and pretty soon it’s so dry that forests fade out, transitioning into prairie and eventually into desert.

The picture is complicated by the Rockies and the Sierras, and there’s also a narrow band of incredibly wet and productive forest in the far west (along the Pacific coast in northern California, Oregon, Washington and the panhandle of Alaska), but by and large, the eastern half of the U.S. is good forest country, while the western half is not. (See the numbers in the table below).

The contrast between the East and the West of the continental U.S., in terms of their land use, forests, carbon, and potential for future sequestration. Sources: Zhu, Zhiliang, and Reed, B.C., eds., 2012, Baseline and projected future carbon storage and greenhouse-gas fluxes in ecosystems of the western United States. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1797 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1797/), and Zhu, Zhiliang, and Reed, B.C., eds., 2014. Baseline and projected future carbon storage and greenhouse-gas fluxes in ecosystems of the eastern United States. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1804 (http://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1804/)

This has consequences. It means that the East has much more forest carbon than the West, and also more potential for future forest sequestration. It means that wildfires are principally a threat in the montane West, but that the regions they threaten are mostly forests with less carbon, or ecosystems that aren’t forested at all.

That’s all a matter of climate geography, but there’s an important historical angle as well. The frontier of European settlement mostly moved westward from the Atlantic coast, and in the process, almost all the eastern forests were cleared and converted into farmland. But starting in the late 1800s, as farming reached the fertile soils of the prairies and the rangeland further west, agriculture declined back east, so that cleared land began to be recolonized by trees. This “reforestation” mostly came about from natural regeneration, not from tree-planting by people. Nonetheless, it was powerful enough to convert 2/3 of the East back into forest.

Where we are today

So now, a century or so later, we have large areas of middle-aged forest growing in the eastern half of the country, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it up in wood. Nearly all of this is happening on private lands. In contrast, the big National Forests and other public lands are nearly all out west – where it’s drier, there’s less forest land, and the carbon stock of those forests, as well as their potential to sequester more carbon in coming decades, is much less. Here’s the map:

Federal lands are nearly all in the West. The red line shows the 100th meridian (100 degrees West longitude), the traditional dividing line between East and West.

What does this mean in terms of using our forests to protect our climate — not just to maintain the present-day sink but also to sequester significantly more carbon by 2050? It means that if we’re serious about doing it right, we should put our major emphasis on:

• The eastern half of the country, not the west. This is where most of the forest carbon is now, and where there can be a lot more in the future
• The privately-owned forests, not the public lands. This is a simple consequence of the lack of public lands in the East.
• Natural regeneration rather than tree-planting projects. This not only has considerable ecological advantages, but it’s what makes most economic sense, since tree-planting in the U.S. is expensive, especially in the West.

I hope and expect that there’ll be lots of good ideas about forests in the U.S. mid-century blueprint, including a few—e.g. building future cities using wood instead of steel and concrete—that would be truly visionary. But what we need to see is a plan for American forests that is as big as our enormous potential.

If so, this would be a momentous occasion, reversing centuries of growing global warming pollution. But before we start celebrating, we should realize that peaking is not nearly enough.

Before looking at the data, it’s useful to remember that even if you have reached a turning point, things could turn again. “Peak oil,” an animated subject of discussion a decade or so ago, provides an excellent example. The argument was based on the peak in U.S. oil production in 1970, which was predicted by geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956. If the same thing was imminent for the planet as a whole, not just for the U.S., it was thought to imply the End of Civilization as We Know It.

Well, we didn’t find out whether it would or not, because oil production dropped but then began to increase again, including for the U.S. In fact, it’s now essentially at the same level as that 1970 peak. Here’s the U.S. data from 1900 to 2015:

U.S. oil production, 1900-2015, thousands of barrels per day. Source: Energy Information Administration

I actually remember having heard M. King Hubbert give a lecture on this trend, when I was an undergraduate at Yale, and wondering how he could predict the future of oil using the normal distribution. (I had just taken a mathematical statistics course, and knew that the normal distribution is generally fit to frequency distributions, not to time series as Hubbert was doing.) But I was a mere undergraduate and figured he was the expert and that I didn’t understand the issue nearly as well as he did. Looking back, maybe I did.)

With this as a warning about the dangers of predicting peaks, let’s press on nonetheless. In March the International Energy Agency (IEA) has released their estimate of global energy-related CO2 emissions—which make up the large majority of global warming pollution—and they seem to indicate a levelling-off in the past two years:

Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions — global total in Gt CO2/year. Source: International Energy Agency

Such a “pause” (to use a loaded word) is not by any means unprecedented—see the arrows for the late 70s, early 90s and the Great Recession of 2008—but the IEA pointed out that this time, it’s happening without an economic shock, at a time of continued growth. Thus, we may be seeing the beginning of a “decoupling” of global warming pollution from the global economy.

This trend is related to the indication that such decoupling is happening with respect to coal in China, which is the world’s biggest emitter. Qi and colleagues have compared the relation between GDP and coal consumption in China to that in the U.K. (where it peaked in 1956) and in the U.S. (an apparent peak in 2007):

Coal consumption vs. per-capita GDP for China, the UK and the US (log-log scale). Source: Qi et al. 2016, Nature Climate Change, Figure 3.

The energy sector, and within it, coal, are the biggest sources of heat-trapping emissions, but the land sector (basically forests and agriculture) accounts for nearly ¼ of the total. Here too, there’s new data concerning peaking, published by the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO):

Greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural and deforestation, 1990-2014 (Gt CO2eq/year). Source: University of Minnesota, Institute on the Environment and FAO

With respect to deforestation, it’s increasingly clear that we’ve passed a peak (although its exact date—somewhere between the late 1990s and the early 2010s—varies a lot depending on which data set you use). As with energy, there’s good evidence for decoupling, with rapid reductions in deforestation emissions while the economy was growing in Brazil and other tropical countries.

On the other hand, for direct emissions from agriculture (“agricultural management” in the graph above—particularly from cattle, some from nitrogen fertilization, and to a lesser extent from paddy rice), there’s no sign at all of peaking, with emissions continuing to rise slowly but steadily. The same goes for fossil fuels other than coal (oil, natural gas). So there are important sectors where there’s relatively little indication of progress so far, and these could easily make the overall emissions total reverse course again.

Nonetheless, the pieces of evidence for peaking, and more importantly for the decoupling emissions from economic growth, are encouraging signs. But it’s worth remembering that reaching a peak in global warming emissions is not nearly enough to solve our climate problem. To stop global warming—to make the temperature stop increasing —we need to peak and then reduce emissions rapidly, to a level below the absorption of carbon dioxide by  sequestration of the biosphere. And to stabilize the temperature at a reasonable level—1.5 or 2 degrees—this has to happen within just a few decades.

So, the signs of peaking, and particularly the indications that they are due to the decoupling of emissions from the economy, are welcome signs of a potentially historic change. But what we actually need to do is a whole lot more.

What kind of beef is “better”?

The meaning of “less” is clear (and the authors suggest that reducing our per-capita consumption by half is a reasonable goal), but what does it mean for it to be “of higher quality” and “sustainable”? This issue has recently been considered in an excellent blog post by my colleague Marcia DeLonge, but here I’ll focus more on the climate aspect of the question.

To their credit, Hayes and Boyer Hayes fully recognize the recent science showing that greenhouse gas emissions from beef are a substantial fraction of global warming pollution. They point to the much higher carbon footprint of beef compared not only to plant foods, but also to other meats, and even say (perhaps inspired a bit more by alliteration than science) that “it may be a choice between fewer cows or chaos.” And in considering carbon sequestration and the theories of Allan Savory, they conclude that “the numbers just don’t add up…. There is no credible livestock grazing strategy that, by itself, can begin to sequester all the world’s contemporary carbon dioxide emissions in real time…”

Yet their definition of better, more sustainable beef is organic and grass-fed (or technically, “grass-finished”, since all beef cattle spend the majority of their lives on pastures eating grass).

From a climate point of view, the differences between organic and conventional are not clear, but as for the effect of grass-fed versus grass-plus-supplemental feeds (e.g. grains, legumes, mineral supplements, vegetable oils) on animal emissions, there’s a definite trend seen in the recent scientific literature. It’s that beef cattle fed only on grass, without supplemental feeds, emit more greenhouse gases, not less—per day and over their lifetimes.

The authors don’t recognize the contradiction between their diagnosis and this solution, even though they mention some of the studies that show that supplementing grass with other kinds of food can reduce emissions, particularly of the powerful greenhouse gas methane. Indeed, the array of studies they cite that show how better nutrition can cut cows’ methane emissions is quite impressive in its variety, including research on flax, alfalfa, cottonseed and fish oils as well as byproducts from making other kinds of foods such as cashew nuts and wine.

Getting beyond thinking in the Holstein colors

I suspect that this contradiction in Cowed’s argument reflects a common tendency to see the question as having only two, diametrically opposed answers—either grass-finished grazing systems only, or the massive polluting feedlots (CAFOs) that the authors rightly, and very effectively, denounce. But this ignores an important alternative, common in many parts of the world—supplemental feeding, but on farms rather than in CAFOs. When well-managed this kind of on-farm integration of plant and animal production could not only reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of the cattle, but also use the productive potential of farms more efficiently, as well as reducing farms’ own vulnerability to the dangers of climate change.

Although there are some scientific lapses such as this, the book displays an impressive amount of research, and also shows a clear sympathy for both cows and the people who raise them. The authors make the problems associated with cattle production abundantly clear. But it’s also evident that they’re seeking ways that humans and bovines can move their millennia-old relationship in a direction that would be healthier and more humane for both of them.

The book paints a picture of a better beef system, less damaging to the climate and the environment generally than the current system is. This is a vision I applaud, and one that my colleagues in the UCS Food and Environment program are researching. However, the book also raises scientific issues that I feel are worth exploring, since the dominant beef production system we have in place today, both globally and domestically, has some real problems.

As in the previous review, my focus will be on beef’s effect on the climate, which is the part of the subject that I know best. But I should mention that Hahn Niman’s book covers several other aspects—e.g. water, biodiversity, overgrazing, and especially health and nutrition. These are certainly concerns of mine and also aspects on which several of my UCS colleagues are working.

Chapter 1 of the book is titled “The Climate Change Case against Cattle: Sorting Fact from Fiction,” and it responds to a pattern that scientists have repeatedly found—that the climate footprint of beef is much larger than for nearly every other food, including other kinds of meat. This is not only the case globally, but for the United States as well. Thus, cattle are by far the largest source of U.S. emissions from agriculture, as shown by the graph below:

Greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. agriculture, in percent; average from 1990 to 2012. Categories of global warming pollution that come almost entirely from cattle are “Enteric Fermentation” and “Manure Left on Pasture;” categories for which a significant proportion is from cattle production include “Manure Management,”, “Manure Applied to Soils,” and “Synthetic Fertilizers”. Source: FAO-FAOSTATS database.

How significant are beef emissions?

Hahn Niman doesn’t defend the current agricultural system that is producing these levels of emissions. However she focuses her critique on the 2006 FAO report Livestock’s Long Shadow and its estimate that 18% of global emissions are due to livestock, a large majority of which is due to beef. This is despite the more recent scientific studies that have confirmed and reinforced its basic conclusions, with only small changes in the percentage. These changes have come about because newer data became available and, importantly, because fossil fuel emissions—the major component of the denominator of the percentage—have grown. Thus, a decade later, the overall story of Livestock’s Long Shadow has been confirmed and extended by more evidence.

U.S. beef production, consumption and deforestation

Two of Hahn Niman’s most important points concern the relevance of deforestation caused by livestock to Americans, and failing to consider the “offsetting” of beef’s emissions by the sequestration of soil carbon. So let’s consider those in turn.

Hahn Niman says that when considering the climate impact of beef, “including deforestation from developing countries … is unfair and unreasonable” (page 45). She claims that “I’ve shown that American beef has virtually no connection to deforestation emissions” (page 23). Thus, the issue with U.S. beef seems to be whether deforestation, an important source of global warming pollution (about 10% of the global total, by recent estimates) has anything to do with the U.S. While this is true of US beef production, it misses the important point that American beef is part of a global market and US beef consumption does play a role in deforestation:

Four relevant points:

1)     While the majority of beef consumption in the U.S. is produced domestically, we most definitely import appreciable quantities from tropical forest countries.

2)     That is because the beef market is now clearly a global one, in which increased consumption in any country, including the U.S., raises total demand and thus drives up world prices. And higher beef prices have been shown to lead to more deforestation. The U.S. is the world’s leading consumer of beef—24.1 billion pounds in 2014, according to the USDA.

3)     U.S. companies are an important part of the global beef trade, as explained in UCS’ recently updated web pages on the drivers of deforestation today. This gives Americans an opportunity as well as a responsibility. We can let our corporations know that we want them to act to eliminate beef-driven deforestation from their supply chains—not just those in the U.S. but everywhere in the world—just as we have done with deforestation driven by palm oil.

4)     Finally—and this is a criticism of our political leaders, not of Hahn Niman’s argument—we already have a long and sad experience of refusal to act on climate change, using the excuse that other countries are equally or more guilty than we are and therefore have to act first. This applies to all the causes of global warming—including deforestation.

Can U.S. beef be climate neutral?

A substantial part of Hahn Niman’s argument on the potential for carbon sequestration in pastures—11 pages—is based on the theories of Alan Savory, the former Zimbabwean rancher now famous for his TED talk. There have been detailed and extensive critiques of Savory’s arguments, both on the web and in scientific journals, so I won’t repeat all their points here. But just add one that to me is quite telling: after many years of controversy, Savory still has not published his studies on carbon sequestration in peer-reviewed scientific journals or made his data available publicly so that other researchers can assess it. This is particularly important since he is claiming to have made such a striking discovery. This omission alone weakens his case—and thus Hahn Niman’s use of his theories—very significantly.

What about carbon sequestration more broadly? Hahn Niman argues that it “may be more than enough to completely offset the emissions from grazing animals.” (page 45). How much evidence is there for this?

Zhongmin Hu and colleagues, in a 2016 article in Global Change Biology, reviewed experiments excluding grazing animals from grasslands at 51 different sites in China. They found that grazing exclusion led to an increase in carbon, both in the soil and in the vegetation, at most of the sites. In other words, they found that the carbon stock was higher without the grazers. This is in the opposite direction of the kind of effect that Hahn Niman’s “offsetting” argument assumes.

The same result—an effect on ecosystem carbon, but in the wrong direction for the hypothesis, comes from a large review of biomass and carbon recovery at 45 sites, with about 1500 total plots, in the New World tropics. In this study by Lourens Poorter and colleagues, both pastures from which cattle had been removed and abandoned agricultural fields showed substantial increases in biomass and carbon stock, with the annual rate of increase in carbon averaging 3.05 tons per hectare (1.23 tons per acre). There was no significant difference between former fields and former pastures in the rate of recovery of carbon.

So, the existing evidence doesn’t show that the difference in sequestration with and without cattle leads to a net carbon sink. Also, it remains unclear to what degree the total direct emissions from animals (ruminant methane, manure, etc.) and indirect ones (e.g. deforestation, fertilizer used to produce feed grains, etc.) could be offset through best management practices (e.g., by soil carbon sequestration in grasslands, avoided conversion to rangelands, avoiding chemical fertilizers, etc.)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t be working hard to increase soil sequestration in pastures, as well as under agricultural fields. And indeed, there have been some promising results in this kind of research. For example, Teague et al. recently proposed a set of scenarios for North American beef production, involving reduced soil erosion through conservation cropping and “adaptive multipaddock grazing” (AMP), under which net emissions could be decreased significantly Likewise, I have colleagues at UCS modeling various agricultural scenarios that will add to our knowledge on this question. But for now, whether or not beef production could ever become carbon neutral is far from settled science.

The reality of beef today

While I state at the outset that Hahn Niman does not defend current beef production practices, it is instructive to look at the current situation. Beef’s much higher emissions are associated with much more use of water and much more need for land. The figure below, from a recent review by Raganathan et al. published in a chapter in IFPRI’s annual report and also as a separate report from the World Resources Institute, shows the size of these differences.

The land use, freshwater and greenhouse gas emissions footprints of different sources of food, per million calories consumed. From J. Raganthan et al. 2016. “Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future.” Working Paper, Installment 11 of Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute; Figure ES-2.

How do we solve the problem?

Changing what we eat is one of the steps that we can take to confront this challenge, but it is not “the solution.” This is not only because emissions related to beef, although significant, are still considerably less than those from fossil fuels. It’s also because the necessary transformation of diets needs to recognize that the consumption of foods from high-emissions, ecologically inefficient production systems varies enormously between countries. It’s in the Americas—both North and South—and to a lesser extent in Russia and Europe that beef consumption rates are highest, and thus where emissions could be cut the most by diet changes.

Beef consumption rates in the major countries and regions of the world. Source: Data from OECD-FAO. 2014. Agricultural Outlook. Paris: OECD. Figure 7-8.

A final point, is that this is a matter of reducing emissions, not an all-or-nothing question of morality. Personally, I have tried to reduce my emissions over the past decade by making changes such as driving a hybrid car, using public transport whenever possible, and changing our home’s electricity supplier to one that provides 100% renewable energy. These reduce my carbon footprint, but they don’t make it zero. Similarly, I now eat beef less frequently and in smaller amounts, but I haven’t eliminated it from my diet entirely.

There’s a real irony in this, because Nicolette Hahn Niman doesn’t eat beef—in fact, she doesn’t eat meat at all. She explains (page 184) that having given up meat in earlier years when she became a vegetarian, “to date I simply have not had the urge to eat it. If I ever regain the desire to eat meat, I will.”

So, a defender of beef doesn’t eat it, while this critic of it does. I don’t see this as making either of us more ethical than the other. But I do admit that it very likely means that my emissions from what I eat are probably larger than hers.

In my final review of this series on the book Cowed, I’ll consider how we can move towards reducing such emissions, but will also argue that beef consumption should continue, although at a lower level in many countries, including the U.S. Here I have looked at data showing the impact of removing grazing, because it’s a key test of the offsetting hypothesis, not because that’s my policy recommendation. Testing a hypothesis is one thing, and science gives us some a basic method for how to do it. But using that method—comparing “with” and “without”—is quite different from considering how to change beef production and consumption systems in the future.

What’s most important, though, is not just changing our individual carbon footprints, but doing things to change the overall emissions and sequestration of the whole planet. For example, if we could get American companies to insist that the beef and other products that they source from the tropics are deforestation-free, it would have much more impact than simply reducing our own consumption. These kinds of changes will help move our global society towards ways of eating, ways of farming and ranching, and ways of living, that will create a better future for those with whom we share the Earth.

According to Cowspiracy, the major source of global warming pollution isn’t fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas, as the world’s scientists are telling us. No, it’s animal agriculture—not just eating cows, but all other kinds of meat, and eggs and milk and fish too. So the principal solution to global warming isn’t renewable energy. It’s for everyone to become a vegan.

Cows worse than fossil fuels? Not by a long shot

Central to Cowspiracy’s conspiracy theory is the supposed “fact” that a 2009 study found that 51% of all greenhouse gases are produced by animal agriculture.

A good deal of the movie is taken up with interviews with people from environmental organizations, such as the Rainforest Action Network, Oceana, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, who don’t seem to accept this “fact,” and therefore must be part of the conspiracy to cover it up. Greenpeace politely declined, twice, to be interviewed, proving that they’re part of the cowspiracy too.

Since the 51% figure is key to the film’s conspiracy theory, let’s look at the study that it comes from. Ironically, in light of Cowspiracy’s thesis that environmental NGOs are hiding the science, this study proposing this figure on which they rely so heavily was not published in a scientific journal, but in a report by an environmental organization, the Worldwatch Institute. The report’s authors, Jeff Anhang and the late Robert Goodland, were not named in the movie but were described simply as “two advisers from the World Bank.”

Inflating livestock emissions by misinterpreting basic biology

How did Goodland and Anhang come up with 51%, rather than the scientific consensus that livestock are currently responsible for about 15% of global greenhouse gases (which includes direct emissions from the animals as well as emissions from feed production, land use change, and manure)?

The biggest single difference is that Goodland and Anhang also count the carbon dioxide that domesticated animals breathe out—i.e., respiration. You probably remember the basics of this from biology class. The biosphere is basically powered by the photosynthesis done by plants, which take up CO₂ molecules from the atmosphere and use the sun’s energy to link those molecules together, making sugars, starches, fats, and (adding in other elements) proteins, DNA, and all the other parts of the living world. In doing so, they release oxygen, which now makes up about 21% of the atmosphere.

The planet’s “heterotrophs”—animals, fungi, and most bacteria and other microbes—can’t photosynthesize, so they need to get their energy from eating or decomposing the molecules produced by photosynthesis. Generally heterotrophs do this by reversing the process of photosynthesis—taking in oxygen, using it to break apart the energy-rich molecules created by the plants, and releasing CO₂ back to the atmosphere. This is the process of respiration.

But Anhang and Goodland’s addition of the CO₂ produced by livestock to the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, ignores a simple but critical point: plants respire too. They do both of the fundamental processes, not only photosynthesizing but respiring as well.

This respiration is how they get the energy they need to maintain themselves, take up water and nutrients, and carry out all the other chemical reactions needed to live. In the process, they release most of the CO₂ that they’ve taken in. And what they don’t is almost all released after they die, by respiration done by decomposers such as fungi and bacteria.

As a result, the CO₂ that plants take out of the atmosphere, goes back into the atmosphere, whether or not they are eaten by animals. Thus, livestock (and other animals, including both wild and human ones) don’t add to the amount of CO₂ that gets emitted into the atmosphere. This is why scientists reject Goodland and Anhang’s counting of livestock respiration as an additional anthropogenic source of greenhouse gases. It’s not additional—it would happen anyway, so you’re not justified in adding it in.

Changing the impact of methane

There is one important difference when it comes to a relatively small number of animal species. These are the ruminants, which include domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and goats as well as wild ones such as deer and antelope.

Their digestive system includes a “rumen,” which contains microbes that can break down cellulose, which most animals cannot. Unfortunately, in the process these methanogenic microbes convert some of the carbon into methane (CH₄), which is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂. It causes about 25 times as much global warming per molecule as CO₂, according to recent scientific consensus.

The release of methane to the atmosphere by ruminants, both directly from both ends of the animal (what is called “enteric fermentation”) and in their manure, is additional. It wouldn’t happen if the ruminants didn’t eat those plants, allowing the methanogenic microbes in their rumens to break it down and use it to produce methane. So scientists most definitely do count ruminant methane in their estimates of global warming pollution, and in fact it’s the largest single contribution to the nearly one-fourth of total emissions that come, directly and indirectly, from global agriculture.

However, Goodland and Anhang didn’t count it in the same way that most scientists do. Rather than weight the contribution of methane as 25 times as large, per molecule, as that of CO₂, they use a weighting factor of 72 times, increasing its estimated impact nearly three-fold.

Why do they do this? Instead of using the standard method that estimates the global warming impact of gas molecules over a century, they only count its impact, as well as CO₂’s, over a 20-year period. Since methane only lasts in the atmosphere for a decade or two before breaking down, while CO₂ stays there for many centuries, counting the effects of both over only the first 20 years increases methane’s relative impact considerably. So, even though there hasn’t been any change in either the amount of CO₂ or the amount of methane actually being emitted, the estimate of global warming pollution goes up substantially—with most of the blame going to cattle.

There has been a lot of scientific discussion about the best way to add together the global warming impact of different molecules, and it’s likely to continue.

It depends just how long you think global warming is likely to be an urgent problem. If it’s something that is going to be critical to human society for the rest of the 21^st century, that argues for using the standard 100-year period for calculating the effect of greenhouse gases. If you’re pessimistic and think that we won’t be able to stabilize global temperatures for even longer than that, then you can argue for even more than 100 years.

On the other hand, choosing to take the average over only 20 years, as the Worldwatch study did, is tantamount to saying that we only care about ourselves, not our children, our grandchildren, and future generations. If global warming continues beyond the next two decades, that’s somebody else’s problem. I don’t find this an acceptable approach, either scientifically or morally.

These two departures from the scientific consensus—counting the non-additional CO₂ respired by livestock, and weighting the methane that ruminant animals emit nearly three times as heavily as most scientists do—account for the biggest differences between the scientific consensus of about 15% of emissions and the 51% figure that Cowspiracy uses.

There are other differences that add smaller amounts—e.g. the estimate of emissions from animal-agriculture-driven deforestation, their use of a much higher count of how many livestock animals there are globally than the U.N. does, their dividing their “animal agriculture” total by a relatively small denominator, which makes the percentage higher, etc. They all have similar scientific weaknesses, and they all have the same kind of impact on the percentage, making it come out much larger (and thus making the importance of fossil fuels and energy smaller) than the scientific consensus says.

How has the scientific community responded to the 2009 Goodland and Anhang study and their 51% figure? We’ve rejected it, nearly unanimously, for the reasons I’ve explained.

Neither the reply to their study in a scientific journal, nor the more recent research papers on the subject, nor the latest reviews of the state of the science, nor the most recent report of the IPCC, written by thousands of scientists from all over the world and accepted as the scientific consensus on climate science—none of these have adopted the 51% figure.

Despite the efforts of both advocates like the makers of Cowspiracy and by the fossil fuel industry (see UCS’ recent report The Climate Deception Dossiers for details), there is strong agreement among scientists as well as among the global public that global warming is happening and humans, principally through the fossil fuels we burn, are the main cause of it.

Cowspiracy ignores this broad consensus, and indeed scientists are practically absent among the many talking heads in the film. It’s telling that although there are lots of statements of supposedly scientific numbers, the people making those statements aren’t identified as scientists, but rather by tags such as “Environmental and Ethics Author,” “Environmental and Food Author,” “Environmental Researcher and Author,” “Greenpeace Alaska Founder,” “Former Whole Foods Market Executive,” “Former Cattle Rancher,” and “Veganic Farmer.”

And who is in cahoots?

I must admit that there’s another, more personal, reason I find it hard to believe that there’s a massive conspiracy among NGOs and scientists to conceal the impact of animal agriculture on the climate.

That’s because my UCS colleagues and I—scientists at an NGO that focuses on climate change—have been writing and speaking extensively about the climate impact of livestock for several years now. And particularly about the impact of cows, especially beef cattle, which have a much heavier global warming hoofprint than other sources of food (including other animal foods).

We’ve been disseminating this scientific information not just in this blog (both recently and years ago) but also in major reports such as Root of the Problem (2011), Grade A Choice? (2012), Climate-Friendly Land Use (2013), as well as in scientific papers and the  2012 book Cooler, Smarter.

I guess you just have to conclude that the makers of Cowspiracy¸ despite its narrator’s claims of extensive research, just didn’t manage to find any of this work. Or maybe it’s just that our rejection of the 51% figure shows that, along with the rest of the scientific community, we’re part of the Cowspiracy too.

Recent research by social scientists has found that climate science denial tends to be associated with other kinds of conspiracy theory as well. As the title of a paper by Stephen Lewandosky and colleagues put it, “NASA faked the moon landing—therefore climate science is a hoax.”

While the subjects are different, what conspiracy theories about President Obama’s birthplace, the 9/11 attacks, contrails from jet planes, vaccination, and climate change have in common is that they tell us that an incredibly large number of people—in government, in the media, and in Cowspiracy’s case, in science and the environmental community as well, have agreed to hide a key piece of information from the public.

Movies like Cowspiracy aren’t believable, not only because of how they twist the science, but also because of what they ask us to believe: that the fossil fuel industry—the ExxonMobils of the world—aren’t the main cause of global warming; that the transition to clean energy isn’t what matters most for our future and our grandchildren’s; and that thousands of scientists have covered up the truth about the most important environmental issue of our time.

Coming up next:  As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m going to do a short series of reviews on recent books and movies related to beef and climate change. This review of Cowspiracy is the first of the series, and as you can guess, it’s about a movie that is fiercely anti-beef. The next two posts in the series will be about books: In Defense of Beef by Nicolette Hahn Niman, and Cowed by Dennis and Gail Boyer Hayes.

As I’ve written before—in this blog, in UCS reports and in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change—by far the biggest impact of diet on climate comes from eating high on the food chain by consuming lots of meat – but not just any meat. What really makes a difference is the amount of beef. This point is made clearly in a graphic from one of the new studies, published by Janet Raganathan and colleagues in a chapter of the annual IFPRI Global Food Policy Report, and in longer form as a report from the World Resources Institute:

Beef has by far the largest climate footprint, not only compared to plants but also the alternative animal-based foods. Source: Figure 3 of Raganathan et al. 2016. Chapter 8, IFPRI Global Food Policy Report.

The orange bars are the ones showing the climate impact (amount of greenhouse gas emissions) of different ways of getting the protein we need. As you can see, beef (the far right-hand column) has by far the largest effect, not only compared to plant sources but also relative to other kinds of meat.

Based on this and other data, Raganathan et al. modeled the impact of reducing global beef consumption by a third. The cuts were targeted to global “overconsumers” – roughly speaking, the fourth of humanity that eats more protein than necessary and/or high per-capita quantities of beef. Of course, this includes most Americans.

They not only found that diet changes by these people could achieve a substantial reduction in emissions, but also that the effect was nearly identical whether beef was replaced in the diet by “pulses” (leguminous plants like peas, beans and soy) or by poultry and pork. You can see the underlying reason for this in the graph above – compared to beef, all these foods cause much less global warming pollution.

A caveat here is that these studies obviously take into account the beef production systems that already exist, and those systems could be improved. A report by Richard Teague and colleagues in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation highlights the role of environmental services (such as reduced soil erosion) offered in grassland environments. Improved grassland management in beef production could be paired with an overall reduction in beef consumption.

Another modelling study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Marco Springmann and colleagues, showed that such diet shifts also would save millions of lives. They modelled a different set of dietary patterns (vegan, vegetarian or “healthy”—less red meat and sugar, more fruit and vegetables) but the majority of the positive impacts—on both death rates and global warming—came from the reduction in red meat. Here’s their graphic summarizing the results, with lives saved shown in A and the change in greenhouse gas emissions shown in B. As you can see, it’s the orange sections of the bars – the reductions in red meat consumption – that make by far the biggest differences to both health and climate:

The reduction in red meat consumption is what makes the most difference, both for health (panel A) and climate (panel B). Source: Figure 1 from M. Springmann et al. 2016. Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits of dietary change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in press.

These two studies add to what is now a substantial body of research on the kinds of diet shifts that could have large benefits in terms of global warming.  Indeed, there are now enough studies out there that researchers can combine and compare them all in a systematic review, and this has now been done for the literature published up through February 2014 by Elinor Hallstrom, Annika Carlsson-Kanyama and Pal Borgesson. Here are the potential reductions in emissions from different kinds of diet shifts, from their summary table:

What makes the most difference is shifting away from beef, whether to plant-based diets or to other kinds of meat. Source: Table 1, E. Hallstrom, A. Carlsson-Kanyama and P. Borgesson. 2016. Environmental impact of dietary change: a systematic review. J. Cleaner Production 91: 1-11

The lessons from this summary of the science are clear: the consistently large reduction potentials come not only from vegan or vegetarian diets, but also from diet shifts that replace meat from ruminant animals (mostly beef cattle) with meat from monogastric animals (i.e. non-ruminants, mostly chicken and pigs).

Raganathan et al. discuss the kinds of social and economic changes that could lead to reductions in beef consumption among overconsumers, and point out that:

This diet shift … would be relatively easy to implement, since it only affects one type of food. Additionally, some high-consuming countries have already reduced per person beef consumption from historical highs, suggesting that further change is possible.

Commenting on the WRI study which he co-authored, Tim Searchinger of Princeton University put things straightforwardly: “The single most important thing is to eat less beef.” He’s absolutely right, but there are other ways we can make a difference too. The WRI report has a good discussion of how government and business policies affect diets, on the one hand indirectly subsidizing some foods or on the other hand insuring that we see the full cost of what we eat.

And when it comes to the deforestation caused by beef—an important part of its  global warming footprint—you can tell companies that they need to go deforestation-free. Not just as consumers, but also by acting as citizens, we can all be part of the effort to end the damage to our global climate.

Over the next two months, I’ll be writing about more of the science concerning beef and its environmental impact. I’ll be doing a series of posts reviewing three different books and movies on this subject:

• The movie Cowspiracy
• The book Defending Beef, by Nicolette Hahn Niman
• The book Cowed, by Dennis and Gail Boyer Hayes

A quick preview: I think the first two, which are strongly anti- and pro-beef respectively, are scientifically weak. I have some criticisms of Cowed, but do give it credit for taking the science seriously. So, stay tuned!

So, what is driving tropical deforestation today—not five or fifteen or fifty years ago? Where is the forest being cleared, who is doing it, and why? How important are palm oil plantations or soybean farmers compared to loggers or cattle ranchers? What economic forces have the greatest responsibility for the land use change that causes 10% of global warming pollution?

I’d encourage you to look at all the new web pages, which go into lots of detail about many different drivers, and to share the link with friends and colleagues. But here, for a taste of what you’ll find there, are my impressions of the most important new findings in the last few years. In brief, what they show is that while many forces, regions and agricultural commodities have a role in tropical deforestation, some of them are much more important than all the others. Latin America, the Brazilian Amazon, the beef cattle industry and enormous farms and ranches—these are what dominate deforestation today.

The earth (Google’s version).

Let’s start with a global view, and then narrow our focus step by step to smaller and smaller areas. Sort of like “flying in” virtually to an area using Google Earth, beginning with the image of the entire planet and then successively looking at a continent, a country and a state.

At the global level, an important new study by Sabine Henders, Martin Persson and Thomas Kastner, published last December, made it clear which commodity is by far the world’s leading driver of deforestation: beef. Comparing the four most important drivers of tropical deforestation—beef, soy, palm oil and wood products—here are the amounts of deforestation for which each was responsible between 2001 and 2009:

In fact, these percentages probably underestimate the importance of beef, because Henders and colleagues focused just on the most important countries for each driver. This included all the important countries for deforestation by soybeans (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia) and by palm oil (Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea), but left out many places in Latin America, where beef is known to be an important driver—probably the most important—of deforestation. Thus, when we get complete global data, the 65% figure for beef may well go even higher.

These numbers suggest that we should focus on Latin America, the source of the large majority of the two leading drivers, beef and soy. And indeed, a recent study by Alexandra Tyukavina and colleagues that estimated the rates of loss of natural forests on a global scale, found that fully 54% of it—44 out of 77 ½ million hectares—was in Latin America. So, let’s look at a detailed examination of the drivers of deforestation in the South America (which is not all of Latin America, but most of it). This research, by Veronica DeSy and colleagues. was based on painstakingly detailed examination of satellite images taken from 1990 to 2005, systematically distributed across the continent. It found that fully 71% of the forest clearing was to create cattle pasture, versus just 12% to plant commercial crops (which include soybeans). Smallholder crops were responsible for just 2% of the deforestation.

Brazil, even with its success over the past decade in reducing deforestation, is still the country where the majority of Latin America’s deforestation occurs, so let’s focus in on it. David Lapola et al., in addition to providing data that confirms the overwhelming role of pasture for beef cattle in Brazil’s deforestation, have also shown the great importance of inequality in the ownership of cropland. Large-scale commodity agriculture increased its share of cropland from 53% in 1990 to 70% in 2011, but it produces very little of the rice, beans and cassava that are the staples of the Brazilian diet. That comes overwhelmingly from small farmers, even though they have only 24% of the country’s farmland.

What does this inequality mean for Brazilian deforestation? Recently published research by Peter Richards and Leah VanWey on the state of Mato Grosso—Brazil’s third largest, but the leader in deforestation when the rate was high in the early 2000s—showed clearly how deforestation is concentrated on the largest farms and ranches. Properties under 250 hectares in size had only 14% of the total deforestation, while those larger in size were where 49% of deforestation took place. (Property size could not be identified for 33% of the deforestation.) Note also that the 250 hectare cutoff for “small” farms is actually quite large by global standard. For example, the 160-acre farm that is the traditional size in the United States covers just 65 hectares.

Richards and VanWey show that this was not only the situation for deforestation in the recent past, but is also the case for the threat of deforestation in the future. This is simply because only 3% of the remaining forest is on “small” properties, while more than ten times as much is on the larger farms and ranches (greater than 250 hectares). So, stopping deforestation by the big landholders is of overwhelming importance – not just to Brazil, but to the global climate as well.

Before these recent studies, we tended to talk about the locations and causes of tropical deforestation—Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia; beef, palm oil, soy and timber; small subsistence farmers and large-scale commodity agriculture—as if all of them were more or less equally important parts of the problem. Now we know that they are not. Land ownership and economic power are extremely unequal, and so is the responsibility for deforestation. We need to focus our efforts on the drivers that are most important—not just for reasons of justice, but also because it’s going to be the only effective way to end deforestation.

But beyond the number, there’s another important scientific issues being debated in this section. It’s expressed in three concepts that are part of the draft text, but “bracketed”—not yet agreed to. They’re “[climate neutrality]”, “[decarbonization]” and “[carbon budget]”; there’s also a statement of the goal as “[Achieving zero global GHG emissions by 2060-2080]. What do these words mean, how are they related, and why are they so important?

First, a bit of scientific background. There are several greenhouse gases (global warming pollutants), but the most important by far are carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O). There are also different sectors of the global economy that emit these gases. The energy sector (including electric power, transportation, industry) plus cement production mostly  emits CO₂. The land sector—agriculture and forests—emits CO₂ as well, mostly from deforestation, but is dominated by emissions of methane (e.g. from cattle and from rice paddies) and of nitrous oxide (from fertilizers and manure).

Besides the predominant gases emitted, there’s another critical difference between the energy the land sectors. That’s the fact that the land sector can not only emit CO₂, e.g. as forests are cut down, but can also take CO₂ out of the atmosphere as they grow back. In negotiating language we say that the land sector carries out both “emissions” and “removals.” Another way of expressing this is that in net terms, it could be either a “source” (emissions are greater than removals) or a “sink” (emissions are less than removals.)

As Nancy Harris of the World Resources Institute said Sunday in a talk at the Global Landscape Forum today, forests are “the original decarbonization machines—the carbon capture and storage technique invented by nature.” And I’d add, by far the best invented by anyone—nature or us.

How does this relate to the meanings of “decarbonization,” “climate neutral” and “carbon budget” and the proposed goal of reaching zero greenhouse gas emissions by around 2070? Here, I’m following the definitions in a 2015 paper by Joeri Rogelj and colleagues in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, entitled “Zero emission targets as long-term global goals for climate protection.” As they explain:

• Decarbonization means eliminating all CO₂ emissions from the energy/cement sector—i.e. zero CO₂ emissions, but just for that gas and just in those sectors
• Carbon neutrality means zero net CO₂ emissions from all sectors—i.e. that emissions from energy and land are equal to removals (which only can come from the land sector)
• Climate neutrality means zero net emissions of all greenhouse gases from all sectors. Thus, it’s the most complete of the three concepts; it covers the impacts of all the major gases going both into and out of the atmosphere from all human activities. In a common shorthand, it’s the concept that corresponds to “what the atmosphere sees”

 These are the definitions, but why do the differences matter? Here, it’s important to recognize one of the most important discoveries in climate science in the past decade, and perhaps many decades. This is that the increase in the global temperature is essentially proportional to the total amount that has been emitted. Here’s a graph showing this, from the IPCC’s latest assessment report (AR5):

The increase in global temperature is proportional to cumulative emissions. Source: IPCC, AR5, Synthesis Report, Figure 5.1b

The more we emit, the more temperatures go up. So, how much can we emit if we want temperatures to stabilize – to stop increasing altogether? The answer, clearly, is zero. Or, as one of the papers announcing this discovery was entitled, “Stabilizing climate requires near-zero emissions.”

You may have noted that the graph above shows CO₂ emissions, not all greenhouse gases. This is because eventually, CO₂ is the gas that matters most. That’s because once emitted, it lasts in the atmosphere for many centuries, while methane breaks down over decades. So in the very long term, it’s total CO₂ emissions that need to go to zero, in net terms — i.e., carbon neutrality. But in the sort-of-long term—e.g. the 21st century—all three gases matter, so we will need climate neutrality in order to keep temperatures from continuing to rise throughout our lifetimes.

A very important point is that it’s net emissions that we’re talking about here—emissions minus removals. That’s what adds up to cumulative emissions, which is what determines how much the global temperature rises. So if we want global temperatures to stop rising—i.e., a stable climate—we have to make net emissions equal to zero.

In fact, if we not only want to stabilize temperatures, but stabilize them at a level that avoids dangerous climate change, we actually have to go past zero. That is, we’ve already emitted so much, that we’ll need net negative emissions to get to 1.5 degrees or even probably to 2 degrees of temperature rise.

How is negative emissions possible? Only with the help of that original decarbonization machine, the forest. We’ll need to reduce energy sector emissions by 90 or 95 percent, maintain the current removals from existing forests, and also increase those removals by restoring forests and other natural ecosystems. The new forests’ capacity to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere is quite limited, so they can only do a small part of the job. But it’s a critical part, because it’s what gets us to and past zero net emissions. That is, it’s what makes carbon neutrality and climate neutrality possible. Decarbonization is just not enough.

Now, let’s bring this back to the negotiations and the debate about the collective long-term goal. Sometimes it’s useful to go back to the starting point so as to remember why the world’s nations started this whole process in the first place. In the case of the climate negotiations, that means going back to 1992 and the signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—the “Convention.” And in fact, the Convention says quite clearly, in its Article 2 what is its “ultimate objective.” It’s:

“stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

So the Convention is clear – greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have to stabilize. To achieve this, net emissions have to drop to zero. In other words, climate neutrality.

A letter from an eminent group of scientists to the U.S. presidential candidates, just released by UCS,  recognizes this reality. It urges them “to put our nation on a path to a vibrant economy free from carbon pollution by mid-century.” As they indicate, “moving away from fossil fuels…..coupled with increases in carbon uptake in our nation’s forests and soils, can bring us well within reach of an economy free of carbon pollution by mid-century.”

These scientists have recognized that if the world is to achieve climate neutrality, developed countries will need to take the lead. This same recognition is why the Union of Concerned Scientists has adopted, as one of its five Strategic Goals, the achievement of climate-neutrality by the U.S. by the year 2050.

So far, I have focused mostly on the science underlying the choice of a long-term goal. But let me conclude with two other points—one about policy, and one about morality.

The policy point relates to how we go about structuring our approach to zero. Some have argued that we should separate the land sector from the energy sector, with separate accounting for their emissions and removals and different long-term goals. We could do that—but the atmosphere wouldn’t care. It mixes the net emissions all together, irrespective of the sectors from which they came. So it’s the total net emissions from both sectors—all the CO₂ and methane and nitrous oxide that we emit, minus all the CO₂ that we remove, that matters for our climate future.

The moral point goes beyond science. It’s about our responsibility as humans living on earth. If, as Pope Francis put it in Laudato Si’, we “care for our common home,” then we need to realize that “dangerous climate change” doesn’t just mean dangerous for us living humans. The danger we have created is to our children and grandchildren and generations to come, and also to all the marvelous species with whom we share our planet. Climate neutrality is necessary for our future—but for their future too. It means that, as stewards of our common home, we will finally stop breaking it apart.

There’s a new statue standing in front of the Gard du Nord train station here in Paris. It’s called “Angel Bear:”

“Angel Bear”, a statue by Richard Texier in front of the Gare du Nord train station, Paris. Source: Doug Boucher

It’s nothing like any species living on earth today – a bear, but bright red, full of holes, and with enormous wings. But perhaps, at least for this week, it can represent the future that we need to create. We need to begin to fly.

The new figures show that it’s not. Last year we saw a decrease of 18%, but this year that was essentially wiped out by an increase of 16%. Thus we’re almost exactly back to where things were two years ago, with an annual deforestation level of 5,831 km², versus 5,891 km² in 2012–2013.

This year’s increase doesn’t by any means wipe out all the progress of previous years, as you can see from the graph of the annual figures below. With the new number, Amazon deforestation is still 70% below the average level from 1996 to 2005 that Brazil uses as its baseline.

Brazil’s Amazon deforestation dropped dramatically after 2005, but that progress has been stymied since 2012. Source of data: INPE, Brazil; www.inpe.br

But the sawtooth pattern of the last four years – down, up, down, and up again, all within a range of about 5,000 to 6,000 km²/year – does show that the nearly-continuous reduction since 2005 has stopped.

Coincidentally, this ending of the downward trend came just a few months after the Brazilian government released its “INDC,” telling the international community the climate actions it plans to take in the 2020s. While quite positive in some ways, on forests the INDC was disappointing, and for some of the same reasons as the new figure. It indicated a plan for a substantial slowdown in Brazil’s progress in reducing Amazon deforestation, with the goal of reaching zero only by 2030 – and even then, only for illegal deforestation, not for deforestation overall.

This lowered ambition matters not only for Brazil, which contains 60% of the Amazon forest. It is the largest tropical forest nation – and until the last decade’s progress, it was the largest tropical deforesting nation as well.

Thus what happens in Brazil matters not only for the Amazon as a whole, but for global deforestation too. If deforestation stops being decreased in the Brazilian Amazon, it could well end the decrease in tropical deforestation worldwide shown by several recent datasets. This would have serious impacts on the climate, since deforestation accounts for nearly 10% of global warming pollution.

Not an auspicious start for the Paris climate negotiations. Let’s hope that tomorrow, as 150 world leaders gather here to open the talks, that we have more positive news.

Overall, the intended contributions are disappointing. It’s clear that the sum of the INDCs doesn’t add up to what the world needs to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Their treatment of the land sector, particularly for some of the largest countries, shows limited ambition and in some cases doesn’t talk about any actions at all.

Some countries that have achieved a great deal in past decades in reducing deforestation or in reforesting, propose to do considerably less in the years to come. The most important sources of agricultural emissions, such as methane and nitrous oxide from ruminant livestock such as beef cattle, are seldom even mentioned.

Livestock, especially beef cattle, are both the largest source of agricultural global warming pollution and the biggest driver of tropical deforestation. Photo: Doug Boucher

Furthermore, there is a real deficit in transparency. The clear and specific information one needs to understand what a country is proposing to do – numbers for emissions reductions, sequestration amounts, business-as-usual reference levels, time periods, costs, and which actions are conditional on financing – are all too often lacking.

It turns out that some of the world’s smaller countries did considerably better with respect to transparency and ambition than the large ones. In all three of our white papers analyzing the INDCs, we highlighted how nations like Mexico, Morocco, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo actually did better by the land sector in their INDCs, compared to the U.S., the E.U., China, Brazil, Indonesia and India.

So, what now? One of the important results of the Paris COP should be an agreement on how the INDCs will be revised and improved next year. (They’re also likely to be renamed. One of the leading candidates for the new term is “NDMC,” which despite how it sounds is not actually a tribute to the 1980s hip-hop group.)

In those revisions, what might we hope for from the land sector, combining some of the best features of the INDCs from different countries? Here’s a short list of elements that could be borrowed:

• Clarity concerning accounting, from the U.S. and the European Union
• Integration of mitigation and adaptation plans, from Mexico
• Proposed reductions given in absolute numbers (how much they’ll cut, measured in tons of greenhouse gas emissions), from Brazil
• Ambitious goals to reduce deforestation, from Ethiopia
• Similar ambition in terms of reforestation, from India
• Ending emissions from the clearing of peat swamps, from Indonesia
• Plans for a transition to sustainable agriculture, from Morocco
• Estimates of the costs, separated out by sector and with clarity about which plans are dependent on outside financing, from the DRC

Reaching and surpassing carbon neutrality will require restoring forests, as well as large reductions in emissions. Photo: Doug Boucher

We’d need to add in some things that have enormous potential but were not clearly put forward by any nation:

• Recognition that the largest sources of land-sector emissions come from diets which are overly rich in high-emissions foods – too rich for our health, in fact.
• A commitment to reducing the excessive use of fertilizer and manure on crops, which wastes money and resources, pollutes the air and water, and leads to large emissions of the highly-potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.
• The long-term goal for the planet as a whole, of reaching and surpassing carbon neutrality – getting to total emissions that are less than total carbon sequestration, so that in net terms we’re removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in the second half of the twenty-first century.

No country has come close to including all of what we need. But by learning from each other’s INDCs, each could make a commitment next year that would add up to what the health of the planet requires.

This is a manifestation of an old narrative: that deforestation and environmental destruction are the fault of the poor. Since they’re doing this “just to feed their families,” it would be unjust to stop them, and since the big companies aren’t the ones to blame, it wouldn’t do any good to go after them either. So: too bad, but nothing can be done.

This story is often repeated, not only in Southeast Asia about palm oil but throughout the tropics, and has sometimes been influential among people who feel torn between their love of the environment and their dedication to social justice. But, is it true? Here’s what the scientific evidence shows.

Last year, an important paper on the subject was published in Conservation Letters by Janice Lee and colleagues that looked at just this question. Using data from Sumatra covering the period 2000-2010, they found that smallholders were responsible for just 11% of the deforestation, even though their farms covered about 40% of the land in oil palm. Large private enterprises, on the other hand, caused 88% of the deforestation. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, the figures were almost identical: 9% and 90%. So it’s overwhelmingly the big companies that are destroying forest to create oil palm plantations and causing dangerous climate change.

A related recent study was done in Peru by Victor Gutierrez-Velez and colleagues, and was published in 2011 in Environmental Research Letters. They found that, while large landowners had higher palm oil yields than small farmers, they nonetheless destroyed much more forest because they preferred to get large concessions in forested regions rather than expand onto already-cleared land.

Most of the deforestation due to oil palm is caused by large plantations. SOURCE: Sharon Smith, UCS.

These studies not only show that the narrative about who’s causing deforestation is incorrect. They also reflect broader, global issues about the unequal distribution of land. A recent background paper for the 2014 issue of the FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture report estimated that the world has somewhat over 570 million farms, and the vast majority of these are very small. In fact, more than 475 million of them are less than 2 hectares (5 acres) in size, and more than 410 million are less than 1 hectare. But while 84% of farms are under 2 hectares, they control only 12% of global farmland.

Another part of the puzzle comes from an important 2010 study in Nature Geoscience, by Ruth DeFries and colleagues. They showed how the causes of deforestation have changed in the 21st century. It’s not driven by peasant farmers producing for their own subsistence, but predominantly by large-scale commercial farms, ranches and plantations producing commodities for urban and export markets.

Taken together, this evidence shows that if we keep on repeating the 20th-century narrative about the causes of deforestation, we’re blaming the wrong people and giving the large and mid-size companies a pass. This story was effectively rebutted in Indonesia by Mansuetus Darto, who chairs Indonesia’s Oil Palm Smallholders Union (SPKS). The government is using “the welfare of oil palm farmers” to oppose attempts to reduce deforestation, he told the Jakarta Globe, while failing to address smallholders’ real problems. He pointed to an Agriculture Ministry regulation that prevents palm oil farmers from getting bank loans, and the ending of both training for them to increase their yields and the provision of good-quality seeds that would allow them to do this.

Darto concluded, “The real focus should be on how to increase productivity instead of expanding the plantations.” He’s absolutely right.

Then last year Francesco Tubiello of the FAO and colleagues, using more recent data than had been available to the IPCC, published a paper in the journal Global Change Biology, showing that emissions from deforestation had fallen in all three datasets they analyzed, while those from agriculture had increased. Also last year Do-Hyung Kim and colleagues from the University of Maryland, using a global tree cover dataset, found that losses of tree cover in the humid tropics had peaked in the 2000-2005 period and declined in the following five years. Other recent pan-tropical and regional studies – e.g. by Frederic Achard and colleagues on the tropics, Mitch Aide and colleagues on Latin America, and Phillipe Mayaux and colleagues on African rainforests – are broadly consistent with this trend.

But there still remained some questions, because one analysis, done by Matt Hansen and colleagues from the University of Maryland and using the same dataset but different methods as Kim et al., had found a 5-8% increase in the rate of loss of global tree cover from 2000 to 2012. Although some of the differences could be explained by differences in dates, areas included, methods, and definitions – forest vs. tree cover, net vs. gross loss – the discrepancy did raise questions about the trend found by the large majority of studies.

One of the nice things about science is that disagreements don’t continue forever. Often they actually do get settled, either by new data or by improvements in our methods of analysis. Both of these things have now happened with respect to the Hansen et al. data, which is made available through the Global Forest Watch 2.0 (GfW) platform of the World Resources Institute. At the start of September GfW released new data for 2014, as well as revisions of tree cover loss figures for earlier years. Taken together, the GfW figures show that global tree cover loss reached a high point of about 23 million hectares in 2012, but then dropped in both the following two years to 19 million hectares in 2014, a reduction of about 20%. This brings it down to a level below that of 2004, a decade earlier.

At nearly the same time, we got a large new set of forest data from the FAO, in the form of its 2015 Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA 2015). The FRA 2015 data show the same decreasing trend in deforestation as the other analyses, but there is lots of additional information that helps to understand how different kinds of forest (and other types of tree cover) are changing. The FRA 2015 data has been analyzed from many different points of view, in a collection of 14 articles in a special issue of the scientific journal Forest Ecology and Management.

Compared to the last FRA in 2010 and those in previous years, there is a considerably wider range of data — not only country-by-country information on the area of forest (login required for Science Direct links), but also on biomass, carbon, wood production, emissions and removals of CO₂, ecosystem services, protected areas, natural disturbances, ownership, income, expenditure, and progress towards sustainable management. The capacity of countries to monitor their forests and the quality of the data is distinguished in three tiers, with the encouraging news that 59% of the world’s forest area is now in the top tier, and only 11% in the lowest tier.

Importantly, FRA 2015 also breaks down types of tree-covered land, in several steps. First, Forests (4 billion hectares, globally) are distinguished from “Other Wooded Land” (1.2 billion hectares), which generally is savanna-like vegetation with less than 10% of its ground area covered by trees. Forests are subdivided into Natural Forests (3.72 billion ha) and Planted Forests (0.28 billion ha). Only about a third (1.28 billion ha) of the area of natural forest is considered to be Primary Forest, defined as “naturally regenerated forests of native species, where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed.” These distinctions allow us to see the differing trends in different kinds of forests and other tree cover, and to understand not only what is happening, but where and why.

“Tree cover” is not the same thing as “forest” — e.g. this oil palm plantation in Sumatra. Source: Sharon Smith, UCS.

The FRA data also gives us an updated global estimate of the climate impact of deforestation—and for the first time, of forest degradation as well. Deforestation annually produces 2.9 billion tons of global warming pollution (Gt CO₂eq), and degradation—more precisely, “partial canopy cover loss”—adds under 1.0 Gt CO₂eq. Both of these figures are down from the rates in the 2001-2010 period (4.0 and 1.1 Gt CO₂eq, respectively) but are still very significant drivers of climate change.

The new FRA and the 14 Forest Ecology and Management articles also compare the new data to other published studies, particularly recent ones based on different remote sensing approaches, and try to untangle which differences among them are just due to different methods and definitions, as opposed to the data disagreeing about the underlying reality. Encouragingly, many of these articles are written by authors outside the FAO, including some who have been quite critical of the numbers and analysis in past FRAs. We seem to be moving toward a broad consensus on the overall trend among forest experts—but with enough differences remaining to keep us busy debating the details for years to come!

The news that deforestation is dropping is encouraging, but it remains high and continues to be a major source of global warming pollution and a serious threat to biodiversity and the livelihoods of forest peoples. It looks like we reached a peak in the last decade or two; the challenge of the next decade is to continue and accelerate that progress so that the world’s forests are no longer disappearing.

Tropical rain forest in Queensland, Australia. Source: Doug Boucher, UCS.

While the number varies (sometimes it’s 70% or “doubling” or other variations) as does the exact phrasing (often it includes phrases like “to feed our rapidly growing population”, the message is one of urgency and often alarm.

But what exactly is the analysis that this statement is based on? I delved into this, tracing the statement back to its original sources, and found some surprising discoveries. (For a different and much more extensive critique, see the September 2013 report by Tim Wise of Tufts University.)

The first surprise was on something quite simple: how was food measured? Naively, one might think that you’d measure food by weighing it, so that the 60% figure meant 60% more kilograms, pounds or tons. A little more sophisticated approach could be to look at the amount of energy in the food, which would mean measuring it in calories. This would take into account the fact that some foods (e.g coffee or celery) have very little energy, while others (e.g. rice or pork) have considerably more, so that their weights are a good reflection of their value for human growth and survival. Other possibilities could include weighting foods by their protein content, or other important nutrients such as phosphorus, calcium or vitamins.

But it turns out that none of these are the case. Rather, the unit of measurement for the calculation, is dollars.

How can that be? What does it mean say that the global population will need to consume many more dollars of food in 2050?

The answer is that this is an economic projection, not an estimate of need. (That’s why I put the scare quotes around “need” in my title). The authors who did the calculation – FAO experts Nikos Alexandratos and Jelle Bruinsma, for successive publications in 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2013 – made this quite clear. Here is a quote that is repeated verbatim in their 2006 and 2012 reports:

“The figures we use refer to the aggregate volume of demand and production of the crop and livestock sectors. They are obtained by multiplying physical quantities of demand or production times price for each commodity and summing up over all commodities.”

And, in more detail:

“The figure 70 percent from average 2005/7 to 2050 has been widely quoted. It is important to realize what it means: when speaking of growth rates of aggregate agricultural production or consumption, it matters what units are used in the measurement of change, in particular whether quantities of the different commodities are just aggregated in physical units …. or aggregated after making them homogeneous by multiplying each quantity with an appropriate weighting factor and summing up. The weights often considered are food-specific calorie content of each commodity (e.g. kcal per kg.) or price. ….This study uses the international dollar prices of 2004/06 …. the physical weight aggregation would not make sense and the same goes for calorie weights.”

So the authors are quite clear: this is a projection, in economic units, of the global demand for food. It weights foods not by how many calories or how much protein they contain, but by their prices.

What does this mean for the total, and thus for the percentage increase? It turns out that the prices of different kinds of foods, in dollars per kilo or per pound are very different. Here, for example, were the U.S. export prices of different foods in July 2005, indexed by taking maize (corn) as equal to 1.0:

In other words, this way of doing the calculations counts meat, and particularly beef, way out of proportion to its calorie or protein content. So that as global diets shift towards more meat as incomes increase, the projection of “need,” done in dollar terms, will go up.

The FAO economists don’t make any secret of this, so I don’t fault them for the extremely common misinterpretation of their number. Or rather, I only fault them (and the FAO) slightly : their expressions did slip somewhat in successive publications, from using neutral words like “projection” to others that seemed to imply necessity. Here are examples, with the boldface font added by me:

FAO 2006: “At the world level, the growth of demand for all crop and livestock products is projected to be lower than in the past, 1.5 percent p.a. in the period 1999/01-2030 and 0.9 percent for 2030-50 compared with rates in the area of 2.1-2.3 percent p.a. in the preceding four decades.”

FAO 2009: “The projections show that feeding a world population of 9.1 billion people in 2050 would require raising overall food production by some 70 percent between 2005/07 and 2050.”

FAO 2012: “…global production in 2050 should be 60 percent higher than that of 2005/2007.”

CGIAR/FAO 2013: “FAO estimates that global agricultural production in 2050 will need to increase by at least 60 percent relative to 2006, a growth rate of just less than 1.2 percent annually.”

Nonetheless, many others have use the the figures in different and often misleading ways. Here are just a few examples:

The Economist 2011: “..total demand for food will rise about 70% in the 44 years from 2006 to 2050, more than twice as much as demand for cereals.” (The Nine Billion-People Question, 26 February 2011, p. 4)

National Geographic 2014: “By 2050 the world’s population will likely increase by about 35%…. To feed that population, crop production will need to double.” (Feeding Nine Billion, May 2014, p. 45)

And, from Monsanto’s website, a version that is rather different but appears to be based on the same calculations:

From the Monsanto web page on “Feeding the World”, a related but different version. SOURCE: http://www.monsanto.com/improvingagriculture/pages/feeding-the-world.aspx

More food in the next 50 years than in the past 10,000, during a 40-year period  in which global population is projected to increase by less than 40%? Hard to believe, if it’s kilos or calories of food – but perhaps the case if you measure food in dollars. (That’s why my blog title not only has “need” in scare quotes, but “food” as well).

One might say that the error in interpreting the FAO projection was “hiding in plain sight” – all I had to do was read the original studies to find that it was a dollar figure, not a measure of need. In fact, given the authors’ repeated attempts to correct the misinterpretation, I’d go further. It was not only hiding in plain sight, but shouting out loud, “Hey, here I am!” So, why do we keep repeating the mistake?

I soon found out that they were right. Although it sometimes manifests itself in wonky technical questions – e.g. how accurate are satellite-based measurements of deforestation, and will new LiDAR-based improve our global carbon density maps? – it’s fundamentally a disagreement about whether the natural world should be bought and sold. One side sees trading credits for forest emissions reductions in cap-and-trade carbon markets as the best way – some would say the only sufficient way, in terms of potential funding – to give standing forests a value and prevent them from being cut down. The other side sees credits for reducing deforestation as undercutting the necessary transition to renewable energy by flooding the market with dubious low-cost offsets, as well as threatening the rights of indigenous communities to their traditional lands and in general “commoditizing nature.”

The forest carbon markets issue was what caused the breakdown of the 2000 UN climate negotiations in The Hague, Netherlands

Well, the argument has now been going on for eight more years, and I’ve just published an article in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry saying that it’s time to move on. The reasons are simple, but maybe not what you might anticipate. It’s not that the debate remains unresolved (although it does), nor that organizations trying to stake out a middle position haven’t gotten much traction (although we haven’t), nor even that NGOs have found that the best way to get policies adopted  to reduce deforestation was by “agreeing to disagree” and not fighting about the question any more (although we certainly have, with substantial success). It’s that this has turned out to be a very minor issue. As I subtitled my article: “Big Argument, Small Potatoes.”

Minor in what sense? In terms of money. The best illustration of this is a graphic that I put together using data on forest funding from carbon markets compared to non-market sources, and comparing both to an estimate of the funding mobilized by the companies that are the major drivers of tropical deforestation. Here it is:

Figure 4 from the Boucher 2015 Journal of Sustainable Forestry article.

Can’t see the bar for the carbon market funding (far right)? That’s true, but it’s not a mistake. The amount is so small — $ 0.22 billion, compared to $ 7.23 billion for the public (non-market) funding, that the bar is invisible on the graph. And both of them are dwarfed by the $ 134 billion estimate (quite likely an under-estimate) of the funding mobilized by the major commodities driving tropical deforestation: beef, soy, palm oil and timber.

I argue in the article that not only is this the current situation, but that it’s unlikely to change at least before the 2020s. So this big argument is much ado about nothing, or more precisely, much ado about something that’s a mere 3% of the public funding, and less than 2/10 of one percent of the amount of money earned by the main drivers of deforestation.

I’m a realist, and I admit at the end of my article that these figures, although demonstrating the unimportance of the argument, are not likely to end it. It’s an issue of ideology, politics, and how one views humanity’s relationship to nature. But at least we could recognize that this particular fight doesn’t really matter, and move on to a more important one. I’m happy to have arguments, but in general I like for them to be about something that really makes a difference.

Later in April, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Senior Presidential Advisor Brian Deese announced the Department of Agriculture’s Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry. In this blog post I’ll describe those building blocks, as well as the elements of the President’s Climate Action Plan (released in June 2013) that relate to the land sector.

The ten “building blocks” announced by Secretary Vilsack are:

• Soil Health: Improve soil resilience and increase productivity by promoting conservation tillage and related approaches. This would include increasing the area under no-till to more than 40 million hectares by 2025.
• Nitrogen Stewardship: Focus on the right timing, type, placement and quantity of nutrients to reduce nitrous oxide emissions and provide cost savings through efficient application.
• Livestock Partnerships: Encourage broader deployment of anaerobic digesters and other techniques to reduce methane emissions, including the installation of 500 new digesters over the next 10 years.
• Conservation of Sensitive Lands: Use the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) to reduce GHG emissions, including the goal of enrolling 160,000 hectares of lands with high greenhouse gas benefits in the CRP.
• Grazing and Pasture Lands: Support rotational grazing management on an additional 1.6 million hectares.
• Private Forest Growth and Retention: Through the Forest Legacy Program and the Community Forest and Open Space Conservation Program, protect almost 400,000 additional hectares of working landscapes, and employ the Forest Stewardship Program to cover an average of 0.8 million hectares annually in new or revised plans.
• Stewardship of Federal Forests: Reforest areas damaged by wildfire, insects, or disease, and restore forests to increase their resilience to those disturbances. This includes plans to reforest an additional 2,000 hectares each year.
• Promotion of Wood Products: Increase the use of wood as a building material, to store additional carbon in buildings while offsetting the use of energy from fossil fuel.
• Urban Forests: Encourage tree planting in urban areas to reduce energy costs, storm water runoff, and urban heat island effects while increasing carbon sequestration, curb appeal, and property values. The effort aims to plant an additional 9,000 trees in urban areas on average each year through 2025.
• Energy Generation and Efficiency: Promote renewable energy technologies and improve energy efficiency on farms and in rural areas through various programs.

The Building Blocks strategy is based on five principles:

• Voluntary and incentive-based:
• Focused on multiple economic and environmental benefits
• Meet the needs of producers
• Cooperative and focused on building partnerships
• Assess progress and measure success

USDA estimates that taken together, these steps will reduce net emissions and increase sequestration by more than 120 million tons of CO₂eq/year by 2025. This would be equal to about 2% of current U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It didn’t detail how much is expected to result from each program, or from reduced emissions compared to increased sequestration.

The land sector has major potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

While most of these steps extend or go beyond the land-sector steps announced in the June 2013 Climate Action Plan, the CAP also included other kinds of agricultural or forest actions. These included:

• Preserving the Role of Forests in Mitigating Climate Change, working to identify new approaches to protect and restore our forests, as well as other critical landscapes including grasslands and wetlands, in the face of a changing climate.
• Identifying Vulnerabilities of Key Sectors to Climate Change, reporting on the impacts of climate change on other key sectors and strategies to address them, with priority efforts including food supplies, oceans, and coastal communities.
• Conserving Land and Water Resources, implementing climate-adaptation strategies that promote resilience in fish and wildlife populations, forests and other plant communities, freshwater resources, and the ocean; as well as directing federal agencies to identify and evaluate additional approaches to improve our natural defenses against extreme weather, protect biodiversity and conserve natural resources in the face of a changing climate, and manage our public lands and natural systems to store more carbon.

• Maintaining Agricultural Sustainability, building on the existing network of federal climate- science research and action centers to create seven new Regional Climate Hubs to deliver tailored, science-based knowledge to farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners and work with partners to support climate resilience.
• Reducing Wildfire Risks, working to make landscapes more resistant to wildfires, which are exacerbated by heat and drought conditions resulting from climate change, and expanding and prioritizing forest and rangeland restoration efforts in order to make natural areas and communities less vulnerable to catastrophic fire.
• Providing a Toolkit for Climate Resilience that centralizes access to data-driven resilience tools, services, and best practices, including access to the U.S. Geological Survey’s “visualization tool” to assess the amount of carbon absorbed by landscapes.

The Climate Action Plan also included actions to reduce emissions or increase sequestration in other countries. Most notable of these with respect to the land sector were continued support for REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, plus related pro-forest policies) and negotiating global free trade in environmental goods and services, with the participation of countries accounting for 90% of global trade in environmental goods.

These are all worthy initiatives and will contribute to meeting the 2020 and 2025 U.S. emission reduction pledges. But as our recent analysis shows, there is tremendous additional potential to both reduce emissions and increase sequestration in the land use sector, in areas such as reducing the excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer (which leads to dead zones such as in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and produces nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times as powerful as CO2), and encouraging policies and practices that will lead the American food system to produce and meet the demand for more healthful foods, which would also result in lower emissions, as pointed out by the recent Scientific Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.)

In the Climate Action Plan, the Administration looked forward to this year’s negotiations, stating that “The 2015 climate conference is slated to play a critical role in defining a post-2020 trajectory. We will be seeking an agreement that is ambitious, inclusive and flexible.” Those are certainly important goals for how the land sector will be included in the Paris agreement, recognizing its specificities but also the fact that it accounts for a fourth of global emissions, according to the IPCC. A good starting point would be to see substantive provisions on land use in the draft text that will come out of the Bonn UNFCCC negotiations at the end of this week.

Overall, the U.S. INDC is quite transparent about its goal: a 26 to 28% reduction in global warming pollution. We’re clear on the baseline year (2005) and the target year (2025) for the reduction, and there are explanations of the steps to be taken in various sectors: electric power, transportation, industry, buildings, landfills and HFCs. While my UCS colleague Rachel Cleetus has shown how we could achieve substantially more than 28%, this level of ambition is considerable.

But, what do we intend to contribute to the global effort from our land? As far as one can tell from the INDC, not much. It’s clear that the land sector will be included in our greenhouse gas accounting, and that we’ll do it following the international scientific guidelines. We won’t try to count emissions reductions that are made by other countries but financed by U.S. aid or investment as part of our total.

All that is good to see. But it’s about accounting, not action. What will the U.S. actually do to reduce emissions from the land, or to increase its sequestration (basically, uptake of CO₂ by forest growth), as part of its plan?

Changing fire dynamics and climate conditions are increasingly likely to result in some western forests failing to regenerate and being transformed into brush and grassland. Photo: Adam Markham.

You just can’t tell from the INDC. Although the President’s Climate Action Plan in June 2013 talked a bit about digesters on dairy farms to reduce methane emissions (the majority of which come from ruminant livestock, especially cattle) and about preserving the current “sink” (stock of carbon) in our forests, none of that made it into the agreement President Obama reached with Chinese President Xi Jinping last fall, and there’s nothing about it in the INDC. There are descriptions of what we’re doing to reduce emissions from power plants, vehicles, landfills, buildings, appliances, equipment and HFCs. But on the agriculture and forest sectors, there are no specifics. Nothing on action, just on the accounting.

The same lack of attention to the land sector is found in the little-noticed Strategy to Reduce Methane Emissions that the Administration released last Saturday (please see my update in the comments below). (Washington wisdom is that if you don’t want the press to pay attention to your announcement you should do it late on a Friday afternoon, but this release went one better). While the strategy acknowledges that agriculture is the largest source of U.S. methane emissions – 36% of our total — the only agricultural action described was encouraging the installation of biogas digesters on dairy farms. This is a good idea, but it’s only a minor part of the potential, since only 25% of our agricultural methane comes from dairy cattle, while 71% is from beef cattle.

This lack of attention to agriculture and forests is disappointing because the U.S. has great potential to reduce net land-sector emissions. For example:

• Demand-side reductions related to our diet. The U.S. has one of the world’s highest per-capita levels of consumption of high-emissions foods, particularly beef. Reducing our consumption and our waste of these foods, and replacing them with low-emissions foods such as chicken, milk, eggs and plant products, would thus make a large contribution to reducing U.S. emissions, particularly of methane. These trends are already being seen, with a per-capita drop of 1/3 in U.S. beef consumption since the mid-1970s. But we could do a lot more, and in the process improve our health and reduce our mortality rate from heart disease and cancer.
• Decreasing the over-use of fertilizer. We apply nitrogen fertilizer – both synthetic and manure – at levels that considerably exceed the absorption capacity of crops and soils. This overfertilization results in both water pollution that produces the “dead zones” in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay, and the production of nitrous oxide (N₂O), a greenhouse gas that is 300 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. Reducing excessive fertilization is thus an option that both helps to reduce global warming pollution, and also improves water quality, fish habitat and public health.
• Increasing sequestration by forests and soils. Reforestation, revegetation of other kinds of degraded ecosystems, and soil management that increases carbon levels in croplands, pastures and rangelands, have large potential in the United States. For example, UCS calculations based on GIS mapping of global reforestation potential indicate that over 1.3 million square kilometers of land in the U.S. could be reforested – over 14% of our surface area. This total excludes current forestland, current cropland and land that was never forested (which comprise about 7.5%, 28% and 50% of our land, respectively).
• Preventing decreases in our current forest sink. Climate change endangers the current level of sequestration of U.S. forest, both directly through increasing temperatures and drought, and indirectly by increasing the chances of damaging events such as forest fires and outbreaks of pest insects like the mountain pine beetle. Forests currently absorb the equivalent of about 15% of the U.S.’ gross emissions. Actions to preserve this CO₂ absorption from the atmosphere are just as important from the climate point of view as actions that reduce emissions – they have the same impact on “what the atmosphere sees.”

But none of these possibilities are even mentioned in the United States’ INDC.

There’s also a sentence in the accounting language that could have a perverse impact on how we manage our public lands. It’s this: “The United States may also exclude emissions from natural disturbances, consistent with available IPCC guidance.” If that’s just about truly unavoidable events like hurricanes hitting coastal forests in the Carolinas, it’s reasonable. But if it’ll be applied to, say, forest fires or mountain pine beetle outbreaks in the Rockies – “natural” disturbances in which human management plays a big role – then it could lead to doing a lot less than we should to preserve the carbon absorption capacity of our forests. If it’s not going to matter to our emissions total, why try to prevent it? As the saying goes, if it doesn’t get counted, then it doesn’t count.

The lack of any specific proposals to take action in the land sector is surprising, because other countries have been clear about what they’ll do. Ironically, it’s the developing countries that have released their INDCs (Mexico and Gabon) that have been most transparent about what they’ll do to transform their agriculture and forests, while developed countries like the U.S., Norway, Switzerland and the 28 nations of the European Union have said little. In the land sector, those with the greatest capacity to do something are saying the least about what they’re willing to do.

But they are giving excuses. E.g. this from the E.U.: “ Policy on how to include Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry into the 2030 greenhouse gas mitigation framework will be established as soon as technical conditions allow, and in any case before 2020.” It’ll be interesting to hear what those “technical conditions” are, and why they seem to apply in Europe but not in Mexico.

So, with respect to the land sector, there’s a real irony in the first set of INDCs that countries have submitted. Developing countries have said what they can do; so far, the U.S. and the other developed countries haven’t.

The INDCs submitted by the U.S. and other countries are opening bids in what will be a long negotiation, from now through the final night (or day, or following night) of the Paris COP. There’ll clearly be a gap in the total offered by the sum of all countries’ INDCs, compared to what science tells us is needed to avoid dangerous climate change. The U.S., through ambitious efforts to reduce emissions and increase sequestration from its agriculture and forests, can make a very large contribution to closing that gap and put us on the path to the global “negative emissions” that we’ll need in the second half of the 21st century. We’ll be looking for that as we move towards Paris.