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“Fungi Fridays” could save a lot of trees — and take a bite out of greenhouse gas emissions. Eating one-fifth less red meat and instead munching on microbial proteins derived from fungi or algae could cut annual deforestation in half by 2050, researchers report May 5 in Nature.

Raising cattle and other ruminants contributes methane and nitrous oxide to the atmosphere, while clearing forests for pasture lands adds carbon dioxide (SN: 4/4/22; SN: 7/13/21). So the hunt is on for environmentally friendly substitutes, such as lab-grown hamburgers and cricket farming (SN: 9/20/18; SN: 5/2/19).

Another alternative is microbial protein, made from cells cultivated in a laboratory and nurtured with glucose. Fermented fungal spores, for example, produce a dense, doughy substance called mycoprotein, while fermented algae produce spirulina, a dietary supplement.

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Cell-cultured foods do require sugar from croplands, but studies show that mycoprotein produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions and uses less land and water than raising cattle, says Florian Humpenöder, a climate modeler at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. However, a full comparison of foods’ future environmental impacts also requires accounting for changes in population, lifestyle, dietary patterns and technology, he says.

So Humpenöder and colleagues incorporated projected socioeconomic changes into computer simulations of land use and deforestation from 2020 through 2050. Then they simulated four scenarios, substituting microbial protein for 0 percent, 20 percent, 50 percent or 80 percent of the global red meat diet by 2050.

A little substitution went a long way, the team found: Just 20 percent microbial protein substitution cut annual deforestation rates — and associated CO2 emissions — by 56 percent from 2020 to 2050.

Eating more microbial proteins could be part of a portfolio of strategies to address the climate and biodiversity crises — alongside measures to protect forests and decarbonize electricity generation, Humpenöder says. More

The food we eat is responsible for an astounding one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities, according to two comprehensive studies published in 2021.

“When people talk about food systems, they always think about the cow in the field,” says statistician Francesco Tubiello, lead author of one of the reports, appearing in last June’s Environmental Research Letters. True, cows are a major source of methane, which, like other greenhouse gases, traps heat in the atmosphere. But methane, carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases are released from several other sources along the food production chain.

Before 2021, scientists like Tubiello, of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, were well aware that agriculture and related land use changes made up roughly 20 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. Such land use changes include cutting down forests to make way for cattle grazing and pumping groundwater to flood fields for the sake of agriculture.

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But new modeling techniques used by Tubiello and colleagues, plus a study from a group at the European Commission Tubiello worked with, brought to light another big driver of emissions: the food supply chain. All the steps that take food from the farm to our plates to the landfill — transportation, processing, cooking and food waste — bring food-related emissions up from 20 percent to 33 percent.

To slow climate change, the foods we eat deserve major attention, just like fossil fuel burning, says Amos Tai, an environmental scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The fuller picture of food-related emissions demonstrates that the world needs to make drastic changes to the food system if we are to reach international goals for reducing global warming.

Change from developing countries

Scientists have gained a clearer understanding of global human-related emissions in recent years through databases like EDGAR, or Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research, developed by the European Union. The database covers every country’s human-emitting activities, from energy production to landfill waste, from 1970 to the present. EDGAR uses a unified methodology to calculate emissions for all economic sectors, says Monica Crippa, a scientific officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

Crippa and colleagues, with help from Tubiello, built a companion database of food system–related emissions called EDGAR-FOOD. Using that database, the researchers arrived at the same one-third estimate as Tubiello’s group.

Crippa’s team’s calculations, reported in Nature Food in March 2021, split food system emissions into four broad categories: land (including both agriculture and related land use changes), energy (used for producing, processing, packaging and transporting goods), industry (including the production of chemicals used in farming and materials used to package food) and waste (from unused food).

The land sector is the biggest culprit in food system emissions, Crippa says, accounting for about 70 percent of the global total. But the picture looks different across different nations. The United States and other developed countries rely on highly centralized megafarms for much of their food production; so the energy, industry and waste categories make up more than half of these countries’ food system emissions.

In developing countries, agriculture and changing land use are far greater contributors. Emissions in historically less developed countries have also been rising in the last 30 years, as these countries have cut down wild areas to make way for industrial farming and started eating more meat, another major contributor to emissions with impacts across all four categories.

As a result, agriculture and related landscape shifts have driven major increases in food system emissions among developing countries in recent decades, while emissions in developed countries have not grown.

For instance, China’s food emissions shot up by almost 50 percent from 1990 to 2018, largely due to a rise in meat-eating, according to the EDGAR-FOOD database. In 1980, the average Chinese person ate about 30 grams of meat a day, Tai says. In 2010, the average person in China ate almost five times as much, or just under 150 grams of meat a day.

Top-emitting economies

In recent years, Crippa says, six economies, the top emitters, have been responsible for more than half of total global food emissions. These economies, in order, are China, Brazil, the United States, India, Indonesia and the European Union. The immense populations of China and India help drive their high numbers. Brazil and Indonesia make the list because large swaths of their rainforests have been cut down to make room for farming. When those trees come down, vast amounts of carbon flow into the atmosphere (SN: 7/3/21 & 7/17/21, p. 24).

The United States and the European Union are on the list because of heavy meat consumption. In the United States, meat and other animal products contribute the vast majority of food-related emissions, says Richard Waite, a researcher at the World Resources Institute’s food program in Washington, D.C.

Waste is also a huge issue in the United States: More than one-third of food produced never actually gets eaten, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. When food goes uneaten, the resources used to produce, transport and package it are wasted. Plus, the uneaten food goes into landfills, which produce methane, carbon dioxide and other gases as the food decomposes.

Meat consumption drives emissions

Climate advocates who want to reduce food emissions often focus on meat consumption, as animal products lead to far greater emissions than plants. Animal production uses more land than plant production, and “meat production is heavily inefficient,” Tai says.

“If we eat 100 calories of grain, like maize or soybeans, we get that 100 calories,” he explains. All the energy from the food is delivered directly to the person who eats it. But if the 100 calories’ worth of grain is instead fed to a cow or a pig, when the animal is killed and processed for food, just one-tenth of the energy from that 100 calories of grain goes to the person eating the animal.

Methane production from “the cow in the field” is another factor in meat consumption: Cows release this gas via their manure, burps and flatulence. Methane traps more heat per ton emitted than carbon dioxide, Tubiello says. So emissions from cattle farms can have an outsize impact (SN: 11/28/15, p. 22). These livestock emissions account for about one-third of global methane emissions, according to a 2021 U.N. report.

Shifting from meats to plants

U.S. residents should consider how they can shift to what Brent Kim calls “plant-forward” diets. “Plant-forward doesn’t mean vegan. It means reducing animal product intake, and increasing the share of plant foods that are on the plate,” says Kim, program officer at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

Kim and colleagues estimated food emissions by diet and food group for 140 countries and territories, using a similar modeling framework to EDGAR-FOOD. However, the framework includes only the food production emissions (i.e. agriculture and land use), not processing, transportation and other pieces of the food system incorporated in EDGAR-FOOD.

Producing the average U.S. resident’s diet generates more than 2,000 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per year, the researchers reported in 2020 in Global Environmental Change. The group measured emissions in terms of “CO2 equivalents,” a standardized unit allowing for direct comparisons between CO2 and other greenhouse gases like methane.

Going meatless one day a week brings down that figure to about 1,600 kilograms of CO2 equivalents per year, per person. Going vegan — a diet without any meat, dairy or other animal products — cuts it by 87 percent to under 300. Going even two-thirds vegan offers a sizable drop to 740 kilograms of CO2 equivalents.

Kim’s modeling also offers a “low food chain” option, which brings emissions down to about 300 kilograms of CO2 equivalents per year, per person. Eating low on the food chain combines a mostly plant-based diet with animal products that come from more climate-friendly sources that do not disturb ecological systems. Examples include insects, smaller fish like sardines, and oysters and other mollusks.

Tai agrees that not everybody needs to become a vegetarian or vegan to save the planet, as meat can have important cultural and nutritional value. If you want to “start from the biggest polluter,” he says, focus on cutting beef consumption.

But enough people need to make these changes to “send a signal back to the market” that consumers want more plant-based options, Tubiello says. Policy makers at the federal, state and local levels can also encourage climate-friendly farming practices, reduce food waste in government operations and take other actions to cut down the resources used in food production, Waite says.

For example, the World Resources Institute, where Waite works, is part of an initiative called the Cool Food Pledge, in which companies, universities and city governments have signed on to reduce the climate impacts of the food they serve. The institutions agree to track the food they purchase every year to ensure they are progressing toward their goals, Waite says.

Developed countries like the United States — which have been heavy meat consumers for decades — can have a big impact by changing food choices. Indeed, a paper published in Nature Food in January shows that if the populations of 54 high-income nations switched to a plant-focused diet, annual emissions from these countries’ agricultural production could drop by more than 60 percent. More

Coastal cities around the globe are sinking by up to several centimeters per year, on average, satellite observations reveal. The one-two punch of subsiding land and rising seas means that these coastal regions are at greater risk for flooding than previously thought, researchers report in the April 16 Geophysical Research Letters.

Matt Wei, an earth scientist at the University of Rhode Island in Narragansett, and colleagues studied 99 coastal cities on six continents. “We tried to balance population and geographic location,” he says. While subsidence has been measured in cities previously, earlier research has tended to focus on just one city or region. This investigation is different, Wei says. “It’s one of the first to really use data with global coverage.”

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Wei and his team relied on observations made from 2015 to 2020 by a pair of European satellites. Instruments onboard beam microwave signals toward Earth and then record the waves that bounce back. By measuring the timing and intensity of those reflected waves, the team determined the height of the ground with millimeter accuracy. And because each satellite flies over the same part of the planet every 12 days, the researchers were able to trace how the ground deformed over time.

The largest subsidence rates — up to five centimeters per year —are mostly in Asian cities like Tianjin, China; Karachi, Pakistan; and Manila, Philippines, the team found. What’s more, one-third, or 33, of the analyzed cities are sinking in some places by more than a centimeter per year.

That’s a worrying trend, says Darío Solano-Rojas, an earth scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City who was not involved in the research. These cities are being hit with a double whammy: At the same time that sea levels are rising due to climate change, the land is sinking (SN: 8/15/18). “Understanding that part of the problem is a big deal,” Solano-Rojas says.

Wei and his colleagues think that the subsidence is largely caused by people. When the researchers looked at Google Earth imagery of the regions within cities that were rapidly sinking, the team saw mostly residential or commercial areas. That’s a tip-off that the culprit is groundwater extraction, the team concluded. Landscapes tend to settle as water is pumped out of aquifers (SN: 10/22/12).

But there’s reason to be hopeful. In the past, cities such as Shanghai and Indonesia’s Jakarta were sinking by more than 10 centimeters per year, on average. But now subsidence in those places has slowed, possibly due to recent governmental regulations limiting groundwater extraction. More

Climate change amped up the rains that pounded southeastern Africa and killed hundreds of people during two powerful storms in early 2022.

But a dearth of regional data made it difficult to pinpoint just how large of a role climate change played, scientists said April 11 at a news conference.

The findings were described in a study, published online April 11, by a consortium of climate scientists and disaster experts called the World Weather Attribution network.

A series of tropical storms and heavy rain events battered southeast Africa in quick succession from January through March. For this study, the researchers focused on two events: Tropical Storm Ana, which led to flooding in northern Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique in January and killed at least 70 people; and Cyclone Batsirai, which inundated southern Madagascar in February and caused hundreds more deaths.

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To search for the fingerprints of climate change, the team first selected a three-day period of heavy rain for each storm. Then the researchers tried to amass observational data from the region to reconstruct historical daily rainfall records from 1981 to 2022.

Only four weather stations, all in Mozambique, had consistent, high-quality data spanning those decades. But, using the data on hand, the team was able to construct simulations for the region that represented climate with and without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

The aggregate of those simulations revealed that climate change did play a role in intensifying the rains, Izidine Pinto, a climatologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, said at the news event. But with insufficient historical rainfall data, the team “could not quantify the precise contribution” of climate change, Pinto said.

The study highlights how information on extreme weather events “is very much biased toward the Global North … [whereas] there are big gaps in the Global South,” said climate scientist Friedericke Otto of Imperial College London.

That’s an issue also highlighted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC cites insufficient Southern Hemisphere data as a barrier to assessing the likelihood of increasing frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones beyond the North Atlantic Ocean (SN: 8/9/21). More