PLANT-BASED FUTURE
Plant-based future as the key solution to the
climate crisis
In 2019, for the first time in history, the world’s top climate
scientists from IPCC, and the world’s foremost biodiversity scientists
from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services (IPBES) came together to discuss what is the best
thing we can do to ensure our children, loved ones, and the planet’s
other inhabitants, the animals we love, have a future. They wanted to
find solutions that work for both climate and nature, not making one or
the other worse. As both things are existential threats to our future
survival.
The report concluded the most important thing we can do is to implement
“Nature-Based Solutions”: that is, to rewild land and ocean ecosystems.
But, they also said that the primary thing which stops us from doing
this is animal farming and fishing. This is what drives us this week to
take action. That’s why we’re calling for an end to farming and fishing
and huge government support to transition farmers away from these
destructive industries. Fishing stands in the way because, as long as we
are plundering trillions of marine animals out of the ocean, it destroys
the ecosystem. We are heading toward fishless oceans. Animal farming
stands in the way, too. Animal farming is the most land-hungry industry
on this planet!
In the largest study ever on the relationship of farming and the
environment, surveying 40,000 farms, Oxford University found that if we
were to transition from animal farming we could reduce our global
farmland by 76% (the size of Australia, China, Europe and America
combined).
This is the overwhelming scientific fact that underpins our actions. It
is why we feel integrated, aligned, and whole, when we take action in
the name of all the things we love: each other, nature, the planet.
Our imagination is simple: anywhere there is a farm – there could be a
forest.
This is a vision for the future of humanity.
A beautiful one, reclaiming and restoring nature and rewilding.
Don't we all love nature? We know this is the most popular solution the
people want. But it relies on the thing people find difficult to let go:
their attachment to eating animal products. But what do we love more?
Our appetites, or a safe, secure, flourishing world to live in?