The fourth climate speech asks, how do we feed the world?

Half of the world's habitable land is used to produce our food, while the other large areas are polluted by fertilizers, pesticides and sewage. How can we feed the world without harming the planet?

 

George Monbiot, Emma Heiling and Sebastien Treyer aimed to tackle this big question at the fourth Ecologues talk, presented by News Decoder, the Climate Academy and the American Library in Paris.

We have the food system wrong

George Monbiot, columnist, filmmaker, and author of Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet, kicked off the meeting in full attendance at the American Library and online, highlighting the gap between widely accepted claims about our food system and scientific findings that contradict them.

"Almost everything we think we know about the nutrition system is wrong and more than any other system it is surrounded by myth, by wishful thinking, by gut instincts, understandably, and by a complete inability to really understand what science is telling us" . Monbiot said.

Monbiot further explained that land is a critical environmental resource and that the vast majority of Earth's ecosystems depend on wild areas. However, agriculture takes up 38% of the planet's land surface, with livestock taking up most of that land. Grazing alone uses more land than all other human activities combined. Monbiot dispelled the misconception that eating pasture-fed meat is more environmentally friendly than other types of meat.

People want to reduce meat consumption

Emma Heiling is the Founder and CEO of ClimaTalk, a youth-led non-profit debunking climate politics and empowering young people in the fight for climate action. She recently completed her thesis at Sciences Po Paris, where one of the most controversial topics in her research was food.

"I found the potential for change especially interesting once people are educated in an inclusive way," Heiling said. "All of the [policy] recommendations included requests for changes to the agricultural system that were much more ambitious, much more progressive than what is happening in governments today."

In Denmark, 55% of people voted that meat consumption should be reduced, while in Germany, almost 80% of people agreed that you should switch to a diet that is as plant-based as possible.

Heiling cited the example of the European Union's Amendment 171 and the influence of the dairy lobby. The amendment would be extremely restrictive on plant-based products and would prohibit companies from selling plant-based milk in the same carton style as dairy products or even using the word "milk" in their names. The amendment was only stopped due to the campaigning efforts of NGOs and 500,000 signatures from people across the EU. However, a restriction remained in place, upheld by a court ruling in 2017, that plant-based products could not be called "creamy".

"Right now we're pushing people in the direction [of meat], and it would be so simple to make changes to push them in a different direction," Heiling said.