Why Plant Based Diet Can Actually Save The Earth's Climate?

What will be the co-relation between plants and global warming...... surprisingly, there is a huge one! 

                      

   

A World Economic Forum report has recently revealed that switching to a plant based diet and doing away with meats could actually help reverse the effect of 16 years of carbon emissions.

As of now 83 percent of the world’s agricultural land is being utilized to maintain livestock and animal husbandry.  This is not only putting pressure on land resources, it is also robbing the earth of precious water resource which is needed to maintain the animals. Growing plants for consumption surprisingly needs a mere fraction of space. Also, the shift will greatly help biodiversity too.  It is definitely going to reduce the CO2 emissions, the rise of which has threatened even the existence of icebergs and glaciers in the polar regions.  The Covid-19 led lockdown actually led to a drop of 10-30percent in the CO2 emissions.  According to the IPCC, world’s quarter of the total carbon emissions are derived from agriculture and other use of land. We need some urgent steps to meet the Paris Agreement of reducing the global temperature by 2degrees Celsius.

The answer lies in shifting our food habits from that of meat to plant based diet. If the use of land can be replaced with growing fresh vegetables for consumption, the land has its own way of replenishing itself and does in turn help the ecosystem maintain its oxygen levels and moisture levels.

Post the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists and sensible thinking people have been trying to switch from meat to a plant based diet. The new thing to fool your meat cravings is the Plant based meat products. These products are made to mimic properties found within natural meats and are considered to be meat substitutes.

Doing away with the culling of animals for meat, they are made using plant and other non-animal products to look, taste, and feel like meat products. Some common and popular examples include seitan, falafel, tempeh, Tofurky, Beyond Meat burgers, and Mock duck. Many companies in China, US and UK are already making it big on plant based meat products that are changing the way people are now opting to consume food.

The corona virus is said to have come from animal meat market in Wuhan in China and has raised a certain kind of awareness amongst the people about the harms of over indulging and exploiting animal species for their meat.  UK’s Tesco Supermarket for example is betting big for the next five years, on providing more sustainable and clean plant based food alternatives.