As delegates, scientists, and climate activists gather this week in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP27, they have an opportunity to rethink the role of one of the most maligned yet underexploited sectors in climate action: livestock.
Animal farming is often reduced to a single issue—the methane emissions of cows, which contribute significantly to global warming. Yet while around a third of human-caused methane emissions do come from livestock, these estimates are skewed by data from industrialized countries. Consider, for example, the fact that the average American consumes around 128 kilograms of meat per year, while the average Nigerian eats just 7 kilograms.
Generalizations about animal agriculture hide great regional differences and often lead to diet guidelines promoting shifts away from animal products that are not feasible for the world’s poor. For instance, the highly publicized 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report recommended a largely plant-based diet whose cost, based on retail prices from 2011, was estimated to exceed the total household per capita incomes of more than 1.5 billion people. The urgent food, nutrition, and economic needs of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia should not be sacrificed to pay for methane that was largely emitted elsewhere.
