Cut meat and dairy intake by a fifth to tackle climate crisis, says report

The report recommends taxing these foods if the public do not willingly reduce consumption

Families must decide whether to quit meat or slaughter their animals and eat them (AFP via Getty Images)

People should cut the amount of meat and dairy products they are eating by 20 per cent in order to combat the climate crisis, claims a new report.

The report was published by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the government’s official advisors on the climate emergency.

In May 2019 the committee was behind the UK parliament making history in declaring that an “environment and climate change emergency” was taking place.

The new report says public bodies need to lead the way on offering plant-based options for all meals, but if people don’t cut consumption willingly then taxes might need to be introduced.

The report proposes that taxes on beef and lamb and dairy could be needed if the public doesn’t naturally change consumption habits.

The authors say reducing meat and dairy consumption by a fifth would save the equivalent of seven million tonnes of CO2 from farms.

It also recommends a host of other measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the countryside including restoring peat bogs and increasing forest cover from 13 per cent to 17 per cent in 30 years.

“We can’t meet the government’s 2050 Net Zero target without major changes in the way we use the land, the way we farm, and what we eat,” CCC chief executive Chris Stark told the BBC.

According to research from market experts Mintel, almost 25 per cent of all new food products launched in the UK in 2019 were vegan.

And two thirds of Britons are now choosing to eat substitutes with some meals. But the number of vegans (those not eating meat and dairy) is still only 1.16 per cent of the population.

Although the Vegan Society says this number (600,000) has quadrupled since 2014 when there were only 150,000 vegans.

A 2018 study from the University of Oxford found eating a vegan diet could be the “single biggest way” to reduce your environmental impact on earth.

Cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce your carbon footprint by 73 per cent.

Meanwhile, if everyone stopped eating these foods, they found that global farmland use could be reduced by 75 per cent, an area equivalent to the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined.