From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

… In the context of development progress, animals like cows, goats, camels, and pigs should be seen as “solutions with legs” …

Climate policies must not write off livestock

Cattle when grazed sustainably can be part of climate action and help vulnerable populations build resilience.

Ali Mohamed Climate Envoy in the Office of the President of Kenya

Livestock are a vital component of both the African food system and rural livelihoods. Africa has around 400 million cattle alone, and the livestock sector accounts for a significant 30 to 40 percent of the total agricultural gross domestic product across the continent.

Small amounts of meat, milk and eggs can have life-changing benefits in tackling malnutrition, and livestock animals also provide a reliable income source when alternatives simply do not readily exist.

Yet, from an environmental perspective, livestock are often perceived only as a problem, contributing to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This narrow view misses a much more nuanced reality. It is also the reason much-needed finance is not being invested in the sector.

…

In the context of development progress, animals like cows, goats, camels, and pigs should be seen as “solutions with legs” in combatting these intensifying climate and environmental crises at scale.

…Read more: 

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/10/21/climate-policies-must-not-write-off-livestock

While there are plenty of places cattle are grazed which could also be used for growing vegetables, cattle farming is also viable in places where vegetables simply shrivel up and die.

Grazing also improves grassland health – grasslands need to be grazed. Ecologists once believed the opposite, that grazing degrades grassland and increases the risk of desertification. This wildly wrong belief led to the slaughter of over 40,000 elephants – before one of the ecologists who helped organise the slaughter realised to his horror it was all a big mistake.

A bridge in the climate debate – How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change

There are other considerations. On Monday this week a medical specialist I see for an annual checkup told me I had to eat more meat, his advice was I had to replace most of the carbohydrates in my diet with meat. Vegetables are mostly carbohydrates, so I have to cut back on vegetables, particularly starchy vegetables like Potatoes.

There are plenty of other people in my situation.

Reducing meat in the global diet would create a lot of sick people and, in time, a lot of prematurely dead people.

But who knows, maybe some greens see quietly killing off the hundreds of millions of people who medically require meat rich diets as a milestone towards their goal to reduce global population.

Climate Professor Thinks We Should ‘Cull’ the Human Population to Reach Emissions Targets