| > very few things that will reduce CO2 is going to help against deforestation Reform of agriculture might be it. Agriculture is also the leading driver of deforestation (50% of pastures were forested in the past). > large scale reforestation will probably not affect CO2 very much either But it could, it's probably the best tool in our arsenal. And it would not only affect CO2, but many of our other problems too (droughts, biodiversity, warming ...). https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal... Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4 Agricultural land use, particularly for animal feed, poses the biggest obstacle to ecosystem restoration and carbon sequestration, hindering climate efforts. The potential for carbon sequestration is vast, with enough capacity to meet the entire 1.5°C carbon budget. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/improvin... Improving soil could keep world within 1.5C heating target, research suggests. Better farming techniques across the world could lead to storage of 31 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide a year, data shows https://phys.org/news/2023-04-climate-crisis-biodiversity-ap... The climate crisis and biodiversity crisis can't be approached separately, says study https://news.mongabay.com/2023/06/to-meet-u-n-climate-biodiv... To meet U.N. climate, biodiversity goals, 79% of plant cover must be saved, study https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation Every year the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops (upto 80% for animal feed), and raise livestock https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free up an area the size of Africa). |
No we wouldn't. Everybody gets cause and effect backwards on this one. They see that we're using essentially all of our arable land for food production and draw the conclusion that's how much is needed to produce the amount of food we currently produce.
But it's actually the other way around. We use all the land available because that's the cheapest way to produce the amount of food we need. If we had more land, we'd use it and food would be cheaper. If we had less land we'd produce the same amount of food, but it would be more expensive.
For an extreme example, we could probably feed 8 trillion people on the same amount of land by covering all of our arable land with greenhouses.