Laura Wellesley
Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us today, giving up your lunchbreak to listen to what I hope’s going to be a really fascinating discussion. I’d like to remind you, before we start, that this event will be on the record, and it will also be livestreamed, and we encourage you to engage with the discussion online, as well. If you could use the #CHEvents, that would help us enormously. Please check that your phones are on silent, and we’ll begin in a few seconds.
So, it’s my pleasure to introduce Professor Tim Benton today. Tim’s my boss. He’s the Research Director of Energy, Environment and Resources here at Chatham House. He’s also Dean of Strategic Research Initiatives at the University of Leeds. He wears many, many different hats, one of which is a lead Author on the special report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this summer, looking at climate, land and food. That’s what he’s here to talk to us about today, so I’ll pass straight over to Tim, if I may? [Applause].
Professor Tim Benton
Good afternoon, everybody. It’s lovely to see so many faces. So this is a really big ask to try and fit in something that is both a primer and gives you some of the meat too, if you’ll excuse the pun, about climate change, land and food. But I just want to start off by making three points on this. These are images from today’s newspapers. So, Venice floods, Yorkshire floods, Australia, California fires and they are all related, in some way, to climate change, made more likely by climate change. On the left-hand graph, what you see is the long-running temperature – carbon dioxide record from Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The red line is carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, and I hope you can see, without any hint of statistical or psychological bending, that that line is not going down, it’s not even going up, it is increasing. And actually, the likelihood is that this year is going to be a record year for greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
And then, just as an aside, ‘cause I won’t have a chance to talk about it, this line here is a record of PH in the sea, from Hawaii as well, and as you can see, one of the real issues of climate change and carbon dioxide is acidification and warming of the oceans and as the oceans warm, and that’s quite a significant change, from a biological perspective, we are going to almost certainly, over the next 30 years, we will lose coral reefs around much of the world. And just pause for a second there, sorry, Laura, you’re going to have to keep me on track, I grew up in an era where we were just discovering the power of television and one of my favourite television programmes, when I was a young boy, was a programme about a big boat that sailed around the Great Barrier Reef. And then, following that, we had it was Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough and the power of those images of coral reefs was huge and certainly has shaped my life and my thinking about the world. When they’re gone, they’ll be gone, and with them we will lose marine fisheries, because many fish have nursery grounds in coral reefs and will, of course, lose livelihoods from fisher folk all round the world in the tropics. And of course, barrier reefs also act as a very important flood defence, and as sea level is rising by about 3cm per decade, that sea level is rising, barrier reefs play an important role in sea defences. So, in many ways, it’s a nasty thing to be happening.
So anyway, let’s just start off at on beginning. Climate change is not rocket science. Climate change is bloody obvious. We’ve known about it for decades. Anybody who’s a gardener knows that if you go into a greenhouse, it’s warmer in a greenhouse than outside, which is why we have greenhouses. And the greenhouse effect is a layer of glass acts as a filter, so you get shorter wave radiation coming in, heating the ground, longer wave radiation radiates on the ground, but gets trapped by that layer of glass. And in the atmosphere, that layer of glass is actually taken by a whole range of molecules, with particular properties, carbon dioxide and methane, and so on.
So it’s not rocket science. This is a figure from a paper that was written 80 years ago now, 81 years ago now, which is effectively, doing one of the first analyses that predicts climate change. And so, I’ll show you a figure in a minute, but bear in mind that it’s about .4 degrees, as predicted from this, in 1890 to 19 – pre-war periods and actually, that’s what it was. So, greenhouse gasses, as I say, that are rising. This top figure comes recently, September the 25th, I downloaded it from Mauna Loa. The bottom one is the last 800,000 years. So this is all – all of this stuff is from the ice core. So taking ice and then analysing the bubbles of atmosphere that are trapped in the ice, and as you can see, we’re up here now. Completely unprecedented rise, nothing like it in the historical record, of course. And it’s not just carbon dioxide which is this, methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and methane largely comes from decomposition processes, so, wet soils. Rice farming is a big cause of methane, comes from bacteria in the room in and a cow, so livestock is a big source of methane, and so on. Melting permafrost would be another one.
Nitrous oxide is the other one, and nitrous oxide typically comes from manufacturing and burning processes, but it also comes from the use of nitrogen fertilisers, with respect to agriculture. So, actually, agriculture, you can already see is playing a part, because we chop down rainforests to make agricultural land, and free up the carbon. We have lots of cows that produce lots of methane, and we grow lots of rice, which produce lots of methane, and we use a lot of fertiliser for driving the yields. So, climate change, what does it mean? So one of the things that I think that we haven’t done well as a climate community, is really explained what climate change means, from a risk perspective. So, these are two ways of showing the data, and this is the average temperature, on a global basis, over time, going back to 1860, with the 20 coldest years and the 20 hottest years, in the top left-hand corner, and if you remember back to the tweet I showed you beforehand, that’s about a .40 rise in temperature, just in the pre-war years that Guy Callendar was talking about, 81 years ago.
This is a new way of visualising it, which has a lot more visual appeal. It’s the same data. Where it’s darker blue, it’s colder than average. Where it’s redder, it’s hotter than average, throughout this time period. If there was no climate change, of course the red and the blue would be evenly mixed across there, and clearly, clearly, it’s not. Yes, but I had a bit of a stand up discussion, when I was giving another talk about this, with somebody who is a former Oil Executive, and he was saying, “Well, do we know cause and effect?” And my answer to that was to describe this graph. I didn’t show it to him, but describe this graph. This comes from a report published by Exxon – not published, written by Exxon, internally circulated in 1982, and looking ahead at the projected rise in temperature, with atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature on this side, and I’ve just put those arrows on to show where we are today, within rounding error. Exxon – the Scientists at Exxon predicted 40 years ago that this is where we would be.
Now, if you could predict the effect of your industry on global temperatures, 40 years back, I would say, from a kind of philosophical perspective, it’s difficult to dance on the head of the pin, and that’s not a causal relationship because as a Statistician, that’s the way we kind of do our science. You make a prediction, do the modelling, and get a prediction and see whether or not the empirics match it, and clearly, they do. So, climate change. Climate change is clearly about the world warming, no issues about that. But, as I say, we haven’t been good at describing what it really means, and there are three kind of major things about climate change that it’s worth being aware of. One is: climate change. So climate change is the average weather, in effect. So this is a map of the world under 40 rise in temperature. This comes from the UK Met Office, as you can see. So, the average annual temperature in the UK is 100, that’s our longest running Central England, longest running global record, the temperature, the Central England temperatures, it’s just a touch over 100 now. If we go towards a 40 world, which is where we’re heading at the moment, given current emissions and the ambition of reducing emissions, puts us somewhere between 3 and 40. Then we get a world like this. Oceans are cooler than 40, so this is 50, 60 , 70 , and when you get to the top, high latitudes, then you’re up to that 8, 9, 100 of change.
But if you just take where we are, up here, it’s predicting – this global map is predicting for a 40 world that will effectively add on about 40 to the UK. Now, if you add 40 to the UK, that takes you roughly to the same climatic position as Southern France, Eastern Spain, and so on. So if you just think about that playing out over the course of this century, that sounds like it’s okay, we can manage that, it’s a gradual change, we can get there. But then think about the world in which we live. Now I live in the Yorkshire Dales and it’s a beautiful place, but none of the trees that are typically associated with our vision of the UK landscape will still be around in a 40 world. If you think about the vegetation and the ecology of Southern France, very different. So when you think about that 40 change in temperature, it’s not just that we can wear our shorts more often, it actually does mean quite deep-seated change.
The second thing about climate change is that, duh, as the climate changes the weather changes, and as the weather changes, the one thing that we’re all starting to notice is that we’re seeing things that we haven’t seen before. Now Al Gore says – he’s got this little catchphrase, “New York has seen three one in 100 year events in the last decade.” We are seeing not just things that are very rare, like Venice’s floods today, one in 50 year event, so far in the historical record. We’re not seeing things that are just very rare, we’re starting to see things that we haven’t seen before. And this is just a number of climate extremes in the US, this is US data, and you can see it’s just going up through the roof. I’ll come back to this in a second. And then the third thing about climate change is not just the change in weather patterns, whether it is Hurricane Dorian or whether it is floods, or whether it is wildfires or whatever it is that’s associated with the weather, is that there is a possibility, call it a probability, of large scale changes in the climate when something happens to reconfigure the climate system.
And one example of that, I won’t dwell on, but just so that you can think about it, is that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC, as it’s known in the trade, the Gulf Stream, it takes 5, 6, 70 of heat from the tropics and brings them up to us, and that gives us a nice maritime climate. The Gulf Stream is slowing, and there’s quite a lot of empirical evidence that its slowing, and if you run climate models into the future, there’s a significant chance that it stops. Now if it stops, if you just look at a map and try go across the same latitude as where we are and try and find a settlement on the other side of the pond, you don’t find them because it’s almost impossible to live.
And again, coming back to food, were the overturning circulation to slow down and switch off, it would have significant effects on our global ability to grow food, and not just in the UK, not just in Europe, but globally, because it reconfigures the way that the climate works. So, three elements of climate change: the gradual change in climate, the rise in extreme weather, and then, the potential for reconfiguration, as we pass tipping points, such as the overturning circulation. And as everybody knows, I mean, this is an old slide from 2015, but wherever you look, every day there are climate extremes being recorded. And one of the things just to think about from a London perspective, you know, we’re about 10 of climate change now, or global warming now. When it was hot in the summer it was about 100 hotter than normal.
So if you think about, if that were a linear thing and 20 world, 30 world, etc., it will start getting really uncomfortable and not just very uncomfortable. And if you think about London, we’re built on clay, so if it’s getting wetter in the winter and hotter in the summer, that implies there will be more expansion and contraction of the clay and buildings will start falling down. So it’s not just the rising sea levels and The Thames Barrier, it’s not just that we can’t use the Tube because it’s too hot, or we can’t sit in offices, or people die because it gets too hot, they are all these existential things to do with the risks associated with that. And just as a brief aside on that, this is data from a recent database, this is recent data from a database looking at the costs of extreme weather and its various formats, and I’ve just plotted them on a cloud, but if you’ve notice the vertical axis Economic Damage USD in a log scale, if you just put a line through that, you get the slope that says the cost of extremes are rising seven times per decade, and Laura and I were just chatting upstairs. If you take through the fact that if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, there’s 40 years of climate change looped in – linked in because it takes that long for the climate to stabilise, we’ve got 40 years of climate change, we’re not going to stop emitting now, so we’ve got, say, 20 or 30 years of climate change. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, we’ve got 70 years of climate change ahead of us before we deal with it, if the costs of changing at seven times per decade, then that gets you easily to greater than the global economy, if you just take a linear extrapolation, by the time we have dealt with climate change, in terms of the cost of extreme weather.
Now we’re not going to get there, but that gives you some sort of sense of the order of magnitude of the issues. Right, so that’s the primer of climate change, let’s skip on, food, land and climate. The first thing I want to talk about here is the land is finite. We only have the amount of land that we have, and that’s about ten and a half billion hectares of ice free habitable land. Of course that will expand, as the ice melts, and so on. But it’s actually not very much. Good grief, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? When you start looking at the demands on land in the future, you get very rapidly to the point where actually, if you think about bioenergy, if you think about biomass, if you think about bioplastic, if you think about biopharma, if you think about food, if you think about urban expansion, that land becomes very, very competed for. Where is space for nature?
Right, food. So climate change is affecting food. We know climate change is affecting food. This is a recent map of wheat yields. Where it is red, they’re declining because of climate change already, where it is green, they’re going up. We know that climate change is affecting agriculture throughout the world because of extreme weather and so on. It’s changing nutrient contents. It’s affecting infrastructure because of the change in extreme weather, etc. We are moving very quickly into a world of climate disruption. And it’s not just the long, slow change in climate that matters, it is also the fact that as weather changes, our systems cannot cope because of shocks. So this is just a cartoon. If you think we are putting a lot of pressure on our global system, because we’re trying to extract more and more food from less and less land, this is a map showing where there is ‘spare land’ in the world where it’s green.
Our system is getting really, really, really pressured and then, at the same time, our systems are getting interconnected, so it depends on oil, and it depends on cyber, it depends of finance, food system, depends on the oil, land, finance, etc., water. And then, at the same time, the weather is changing and we’re hitting this increasingly fragile interconnected system with a big hammer. And then, when you start doing that, weather effects, bang, people start panicking, markets start panicking and governments start panicking and then you get the potential for very large feedback through markets and policy decisions, which then drive food price spikes. Food price spikes then drive food riots. In the last three price spikes 2007-2008, 10/11, 47 countries had food riots. You can follow the food riots of the Arab Spring and drought in Syria through to destabilisation of people, movement, people change, breakdown, migration in Europe and Brexit.
Okay, so that’s – climate is affecting food. Food is clearly affecting climate. I won’t dwell on the details of this, but this is the bottom line. About a third of global greenhouse gasses come from the food system, when you take into account rainforests being chopped down, agriculture, transport, processing, packaging and so on. And of that, a third, which is greater than transport, it’s greater than heating, cooling, and it’s greater than lighting, etc., etc., of that third, about 50% comes from our livestock. I won’t dwell on it because Laura’s starting to scowl at me, but two big messages from the IPCC Land Report. The first is that by changing our diets, we have a very big chance of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. This is just a figure from the IPCC Report, that shows the potential greenhouse gas mitigations from dietary change, the total greenhouse gas mitigation from all changes in agriculture is about 7.8, it’s about the same order of magnitude as going to a vegan diet. And the total changes that are possible from changing livestock agriculture is about 2.4 gigatons.
Now dietary change might be a good idea, from a nutritional perspective anyway. This is a map of what the – this is a figure of what the world should grow to make people healthy in their diets, and this is a map of what the world grows. And people are increasingly unhealthy through diets and you don’t have to be a statistician to see that those are significantly different. And to a first approximation, if we ate a healthy diet, it would also be a more sustainable diet than the diet that we eat, and then we would get healthcare changes for free.
Final point to make, I’ll just stop on this one, two big things from the Paris Climate Agreement and therefore, the IPCC Special Report on Land, around greenhouse gasses, food and agriculture, is that if we change our diets, we can mitigate emissions by producing less. But also, we might need to change our diets to allow us to be anywhere close to a Paris Climate Agreement. This is the amount of emissions, this green line is the line that we would have to follow, if we are to meet the Paris Climate Greenhouse Gas Budget. Now we’re not going to do that, we’re likely to follow something like this red line. So in this period up to mid-century, where we’re supposed to be zero net carbon, we would be over-emitting greenhouse gasses and therefore, we’d go beyond the Paris, less than 20 aim. If we’re to meet Paris, then we’d have to take carbon out of the atmosphere, in the latter half of the century. Now that taking carbon out of the atmosphere, according to this graph, would use eight million square kilometres of land for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. That’s two and a half Indias, the size of two and a half Indias or about 60% of the land that we currently use for agriculture. So, if we are going to deal with Paris and get anywhere close to Paris, it implies that we have to change our diets to mitigate the emissions. And also, by changing our diets, we potentially free up land that could then be used for climate mitigation.
Okay and the, - sorry, I’ll skill that. That, of course, then leads us to the issue of zero net carbon land use, which is a Government commitment now for the middle of the century. There are two visions for a zero net carbon land use, one is that we intensively grow biomass, alongside intensive production of land – production of food, and the other vison, so this is kind of industrialised farming vision, and the other vision, which is the kind of Prince Charles like vision, is that we demand less from land, we don’t waste so much food, we grow a diversity of stuff, the right sort of thing, we make space to be able to grown in a softer way, and we integrate the carbon capture from biomass in agroforestry, within the land use.
Right, final slide. How do we get towards a food system and a land use system that is zero net carbon? It’s not just a matter of putting on a carbon price on everything. This is a table from the IPCC Report, there’s a whole lot of different things that we can do: changing food environments, we can educate, we can change incentives, we can change subsidies, we can put incentives in place for reducing waste, increased circularity, you do agricultural R&D. We can do a whole lot of different things, lots of things, and it’s not just that food prices are going to rise ‘cause we’re going to tax the hell out of meat.
Okay. So I will leave this up here. I will not speak to this because I am dreadfully over time. Sorry, Laura. Thank you very much, everybody [applause].
Laura Wellesley
I always think that when I hear you give that talk, which I’ve heard you giving different iterations, that it will be less terrifying, because I’ve heard it before, but it’s really not. I think I can expect that we’ll have lots of questions from the audience, but I did just want to start with one, and particularly because you didn’t get to give much time to it there. But thinking about interventions and some of the conditions that would be either enabling or disabling for a positive transformation of the food system and the land system more broadly, which, among those, do you think has the most transformative potential and what’s your belief on how feasible it is for that transformation to happen at the pace and the scale that we need?
Professor Tim Benton
So, there’s the three questions. So, the IPCC Report, that blue slide, with lots of boxes on that I skipped over, says that there are a lot of things that have potential to help us mitigate and adapt and not make things worse. The one that we have the highest confidence in being able to do, is actually change diets, because we know that that can reduce land pressure. We know that there are societal benefits largely from doing that. Then you asked the question, well, is that feasible? Yes, that’s feasible because when you look at the young today, particularly there is a whole lot of climate carnivory or veganism or flexitarianism and awareness of changing diets. And when you look at what the Healthcare Service, the NHS is saying about needing to go to a preventative healthcare system, there is starting to be some kind of congruence at Government level about needing to be preventative and eat healthy diets. So you can see things coming together in a kind of helpful way.
But then the issue is well, is that going to happen fast enough, because that green curve on that line – on that graph that I showed towards the end, if we overshoot that zero net carbon bit in the middle of the century, then the consequences are twofold. That we need a lot of land for the biomass to suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and the other consequence is that we lock in a bit more climate change into the future and then, the risk of passing one of these tipping points gets greater. So, from my perspective, the urgency of change is not that we have to start going down from our exponentially increasing emissions now, we have to actually start going down-down, and not just reduce the rate at which emissions are going up, have to start going down, and that is something that we have to do over the next decade.
Now we can do that, but whether there is the societal will, the [inaudible – 27:15], kind of, societal pushback against trying to reduce our energy consumption and change our diets, etc., whether we can actually do that, I don’t know. So we can, but we might not.
Laura Wellesley
Do you think that’s necessarily that social tipping point as it were, do you think we need that mobilisation from the public, in order to get where we need to be?
Professor Tim Benton
Yes. So, I’ve been working in this space for 15/20 years, something like that, and we’re in a radically different place this year, and at our climate change conference a month or so ago, all of the highlight Ministerial speakers were saying we’re in a different place because of Greta Thunberg and school climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion. The issues are starting to become politicised, are not politicised in a party politicised way, but politicised in the sense that people are starting to care about it enough that it becomes a political thing to respond to and only when that happens will we start getting significant change.
Now whether we get significant enough change at the pace that we need it to, without something helping us along and hurting us, you know, whether it’s a small number of floods or something where people get scared and say we must start acting, or whether it is something like Hurricane Dorian stalling over Miami instead of stalling over the Bahamas and then multi-trillion damage that will wake people up and say, we’ve got to change, I don’t know. And I hope, if we do end up in a situation where climate impacts create enough pain for us to start acting, then I hope it’s not too much pain, because you know, there is a risk that millions of people will be affected in a negative way, over the next decade or so.
Laura Wellesley
Gloomy.
Professor Tim Benton
But the world will be a better place if we change, you know, there is a lot to play for. You know, existential anxiety amongst the young, you know, I do quite a lot of school talks, lots of people, you know, lots of people, in my daughter’s school, are seeking counselling, and one of the reasons for seeking counselling is that they don’t feel that they’ve got a positive world to grow up into. And then 38% of our tax spend is being spent on dealing with the illnesses that are often associated with poor diets. You know, there are so many things that we would be better off, if we have a different relationship with food and climate. But, you know. So there is. It’s not we can’t, we’re going to be worse off by dealing with climate change, it is, we’re going to be better off by dealing with climate change. The pathway might be a bit tricky, but there is a lot to play for.
Laura Wellesley
Okay, I’d like to open it up to questions, just a few requests. Could you firstly wait for the microphone before speaking, that’s because we’re livestreaming and it won’t pick you up otherwise? Could you keep your hand raised, so that we can find you, so that my colleagues with mics can find you, and please could you just give a very brief introduction and just say your name and who you’re affiliated with, if you wish? But keep it brief, thank you. So I’m going to start at this side of the room and work over. So, concentrate yourselves that way. Yeah, go for it.
Zack Polanski
Hi, I’m Zack Polanski. I’m the Green Party Parliamentary Candidate for this area. Whenever I do interviews, there’s always a discrepancy between the idea that the government isn’t doing enough, compared to their status in Europe. I understand some of it is because we’re no longer counting aviation and shipping and something about embedded carbon, the amount of tons that we’re including in that data. Could you speak to some of that discrepancy and how we could more accurately record that data?
Professor Tim Benton
So, some of the issues to do with the inventory, is that the inventory is done, according to the country that is doing the emissions, even if that emissions is for another country. So, particularly in food, you know, we can say our agriculture is producing less year-on-year, which we are producing less greenhouse gasses year-on-year. But some of that going down is because we’re no longer feeding cows on grass, as much as we used to. We’re now feeding cows on soya and concentrated food that comes with a greenhouse footprint from outside. So, that discrepancy is often to do with the way that we account, and on a global basis, it’s not the individual country accounts that matter, it is the totality.
So, there is quite a movement towards thinking about running two sets of accounts: one is your production accounts and one is your consumption accounts. And particularly as we think about tackling – moving towards a zero net carbon land use, in the middle of the century, the worst possible thing to do would be if we offshore most of our carbon emissions to make our land zero net carbon, so we can then trump we’re world leaders. So, it does need thinking about, does need dealing with. Yeah, trade is an interesting issue.
Laura Wellesley
The next round of questions. Yeah, this gentleman here. Do you want to ask, so that you can get a mic for the next question? Yeah, lady over there?
Domenic Carratu
And purely rotationally. Thank you, Laura, Domenic Carratu from Rabobank. A very good presentation. Easy question, can you share it afterwards, and then, back to a more structural question? So, as an agricultural bank, we look a lot at this type of issue, and internally, the 2050 feed nine billion people, you know, whatever. And the question I’ve asked people like [inaudible – 32:53] is, what about over-population as a component in the overall equation?
Professor Tim Benton
Yeah, so, obviously, you know, I’m a Professor of Ecology. So, by nature, I’m a malfeasant, so you can’t have an infinite population on a finite planet, and you know, that much is logically straightforward. But it’s not population per se, it is consumption growth that is the problem. And one American, if I remember foot printing right, is worth 17 Somalis. So, it is really about how do we deal with consumption growth, as opposed to how do we deal with population growth? And you know, we grow enough calories at the moment to feed 11 million people, we just choose to feed a third of them to livestock and throw about a third of them away. We can make our food system different. We can make it more efficient.
Yeah, and I think ‘cause we forget, because it’s so deeply embedded that consumerism was a deliberated post-war ideology to drive economies. And you can easily imagine economies not built on consumerism, but being built on, for example, growth and wellbeing, as opposed to growth and material consumption. So, we could get a situation where the population growth wasn’t really a problem and the traditional argument has been that as people have got wealthier and fertility rates go down anyway, so it becomes a kind of self-correcting issue. Now whether that’s actually true, I think the data is suggesting it’s not as true as we thought it would be, because we’re still so culturally embedded in the way that we think of things. But yeah, it’s the consumption growth, that’s the problem, yeah.
Laura Wellesley
Yeah, okay and then – so yeah, yeah, go for it.
Julia Needham-Watt
Thank you. I’m Julia Needham-Watt and I’m a Councillor from Richmond upon Thames, where I sit on the Environment Committee. We are just introducing our Climate Emergency Strategy. I just wanted to ask you about what sometimes seems to me almost a kneejerk reaction that people should cut out meat from their diet. I say that as someone who doesn’t eat meat, and I worry that then there will be a reaction to get vegetable sources from a great distance and that transportation is also a challenge. And I had a second thought that you said you live in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, and if we change from eating the meat from the farming that has shaped those dales, won’t that also have an impact there and how do you see that taking shape?
Professor Tim Benton
So, very few people, who come and sit in my niche, argue that the world should be vegan or vegetarian. The issue is that if we want to live within planetary boundaries, we can’t all eat as much meat as we would – the market tells us we want to, or we demand, depending on how you phrase it. And as an Ecologist, I would say for the reasons that you talk about, the shaping of the landscape, almost all of our natural ecosystems would have a large grazer that was responsible for doing stuff.
The issue though, is that if you want purely grass fed livestock, then meat consumption would have to go down to about 30% of where we are. And there is an argument to say actually, having grass fed ruminants grazing out on the hills and on the plains, is a rational use of that land, and what we shouldn’t be doing is growing corn and feeding it to pigs or feeding it to poultry. So, although if you look at it, the first principle if you’re going to eat white meat as a lower emissions profile, the total system might be worse off if everybody stopped eating red meat and only ate white meat. So there isn’t a right answer to this, the only boundary condition is that as a globe, we are aiming towards eating too much meat, and in some places, ruminant livestock makes a lot of sense. In other places there are other ways of doing it and you’re exactly right, that pie chart I put up, the world doesn’t grow enough fruit and vegetables and if everybody suddenly went to the five a day, where would we get it from?
It wouldn’t necessarily be easy, that’s a journey in itself. And the reason that we’ve invested in cold in grains as major commodity crops, is that fruit and vegetables are difficult to transport, and they require cold chains or food processing or whatever. So, you know, on the wall of my chemistry lab at school was a sign, which I think is pertinent here, there’s no such thing as a dangerous substance, there are only dangerous ways of using substances. And the same for the food system, there is no wrong food, there is only a wrong way of using food or producing food. So, all things in moderation, as my mother would have said all through my early years, all things in moderation.
But this notion that the world can have whatever it demands, is just patently failing, and so, somehow, we’ve got to get our head round doing things differently. And from a farming – I work with quite a few farming groups around the country, the issue that we face is, how do you grow less and make more money? And that is the business challenge of making this transformation a just transformation for the people who work within the food chain. And it’s perfectly possible to imagine for livestock, I mean, one of my friends has switched from intensive to extensive, slow-grown stuff and gets far more money now from having half the number of sheep on his fields. So, you know, so it is possible, but it requires people to be willing to pay, and not just want cheaper and cheaper and cheaper food.
Laura Wellesley
I’ll take a question here, but give me a little wave from this area, if you want to ask a question next.
Professor Tim Benton
That man behind has had his hand up, and Rosie has got her hand.
Laura Wellesley
Oh yes, two questions here, then.
Walt Patterson
Walt Patterson, Chatham House, a Fellow in Tim’s Department here at Chatham House. I was struck by your graph of the good nutrition and the actual nutrition, and one of the biggest changes is that in the actual nutrition, 16% is sugar. I was dumbfounded by that and next Monday, I’m going to be going to a meeting of the local University of the Third Age, with a presentation on sugar, suggesting that it should be considered a poison. Would you like to comment on that possibility?
Professor Tim Benton
Well, certainly, I mean, one of my colleagues talks about fizzy drinks, sugar sweetened beverage manufacturers, having a business model of selling obesity, and if you look at the total calories sold by a single fizzy drink company in the United States, it’s more than the total calories that would be required for healthy diets on a daily basis in the United States. So, you have an issue there that sugar, when you over consume it, is just as potently toxic, in many ways, as tobacco or other things like that. And it’s not just how much sugar is grown, the other example I would float past you is that we have gone through years and years and years of agricultural selection to sweeten the fruits that we eat. And I remember as a child being weened onto adult food and my parents used to have a grapefruit on a Saturday morning, when we had a big sit down breakfast. You know, this was the late 60s or whatever, and I was forced to eat that grapefruit and I was “Ooh, ah,” was so sharp, and now you can drink grapefruit juice by the gallon, and the reason you can do that is because the sugar content is about double what it used to be. So, it’s not only that we grow sugar, and eat sugar in everything, it is all of the things that we breed have got a higher sugar content or higher starch content, the same sort of things, and that’s partly why we’ve got such an obesogenic diet.
Laura Wellesley
I’ve got a question here?
Stephen Andrews
Thank you very much indeed. Stephen Andrews, in this context I’m a Councillor with Cotswold District Council, Chair of the Scrutiny Committee, and the Council declared a climate change emergency in July of this year. Since then, I’ve been looking at how I’d go about scrutinising our Council, in order to see that they are doing the right sort of things? The immediate thing seems to be that picking on one particular area doesn’t actually help. There needs to be a wholistic system-based approach to the whole of addressing climate change. Certainly at the practical local government level where we’re a planning authority, because there are so many things to do with tourism, attracting people into places like the Cotswolds.
If we move over to EVs, where do they get charged up? Indeed, could the Grid locally stand plugging in 50 cars on a Sunday afternoon, because they’ve all run out of juice? And so probably no, it would collapse. There’s all sorts of things of that sort, the fact that people are concentrating on those issues like EVs, and so on, and the generation of electricity, rather than the rural countryside issues, which we face as well, environmental and biodiversity issues. What I don’t see though, is people being encouraged to take that holistic approach, but everybody’s going for a climate strategy change, that addresses the things that they know about. The Rumsfeld known knowns.
Professor Tim Benton
Knowns, yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a very good point, and I have spent the last 20 years arguing that we need to take systemic approaches to this. And actually, if you think about only dealing with climate change, then typically, that would drive you in a direction that makes biodiversity worse, makes soil worse, makes air quality worse, etc., etc. So we have to kind of try and think about the totality. But then, of course, that becomes more complicated, because it creates a certain degree of policy paralysis that anybody who moves in this direction within a policy domain, is likely to upset somebody else over there.
So they all have to work together and if there’s one thing about Government is that it’s more siloed than academia and getting that, kind of, cross-thinking is really difficult. But it’s going to be forced upon us if we don’t change, and you know, the reason I’m interested in social tipping points, as Laura pointed out, is that we need to have this politicisation of people wanting to address the issue, and seeing that food is related to climate, food is related to health, air quality is related to food, biodiversity is related to food, all of these things are related and are a similar set of common causes, which are to do with the way that we live our lifestyle. And if we want to deal with all of these things simultaneously, it comes down to how do we enable a lifestyle choice that becomes positive? And of course, that’s really difficult, but as I said earlier, unless we do it, it will be forced upon us anyway.
And I think there are sufficient examples, and one of the joys I see it of interacting with governments at multiple levels is that the smaller the government, the more those issues become easier to deal with, because you can get all of the people in the room and you can get all the voters together and have a conversation with them, instead of mailshotting 20 million people at a time. And so, you know, whether it’s London Food Board and Rosie’s work at the back, or whether it is [inaudible – 44:56] cities, or whether it is local councils trying to do the right thing. You know, my local town Ilkley is doing exactly what you’re doing and we’re trying to find ways of navigating all of these sorts of things.
But it’s part of the issue is recognising that everything’s interrelated. So, from a UK perspective, and I’ll shut up in a minute, from a UK perspective, our agricultural economy pays £10 billion into the economy, it takes two and a half billion of subsidies, it creates about two and a half billion of carbon costs, it creates about five billion pounds of air, water, soil pollution from the fertiliser and our ill health coming from poor diets is about 30-50 billion, depending on what you look at. So, when you add it altogether, you have ten billion of positives, and then 60 billion of negatives. And of course, when you look at it from that perspective, it makes no sense to carry on driving the intensification of agriculture, if it has – comes with all of these things. So, the first thing is, let’s try and join up and have a governance structure that recognises that things are interconnected. Lots of people are waving. Hello everybody.
Laura Wellesley
I’m going to give this side a chance, gentleman at the back there, just behind you, and then, back over to Sue and I think Rosie had a question as well.
Professor Tim Benton
I did put my Twitter feed and email up, if anybody following this, if you don’t have time to engage with those conversations, please drop me a line.
Paul Robson
My name is Paul Robson. I’m a member of Chatham House. What is the potential of the agricultural sector in itself to tackle these issues, for example, reducing nitrates, generating biogas from cattle waste, etc., and is there any interest in the industry itself, the sector itself, tackling these issues, without us going into the larger issue of diet?
Professor Tim Benton
The mitigation potential from change within farming, without changing the demand side, is about the same as the change in the demand side, and together they’re enough. One alone is not going to be enough and so, you know, clearly, there are many things that a farmer can do. You know, reducing nitrogen and making nitrogen use more efficient is a winner, from a bottom line perspective, as well as an environmental perspective. There are lots of things like that. I think the issue is that if we try and tackle part of the problem, let’s call it emissions, then the other parts of the problem, the biodiversity loss, the ill health that comes from growing the wrong thing and producing too much sugar, doesn’t get tackled. So, it makes more sense, from a societal perspective, to be systemic about. And I sometimes use the example, you know, you can imagine making a supply chain sustainable, by farming in an environmentally sensitive way, but if you’re growing tobacco, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, from a total societal cost perspective, even if it’s sustainably produced. So, it’s how do we deal with all of the issues and given that changing diets is necessary, if we’re not going to bankrupt the Health Service, changing diets will give us the climate change for free, if you look at it like that, if we get it right.
Laura Wellesley
So we’ve got two questions at the back and then a gentleman here waving his hand.
Sue Pritchard
Sue Pritchard, Director of the RSA’s Food Farming and Countryside Commission and Tim is also one of our members of our Research Advisory Group, so it’s lovely to hear all over again, all of the things that we have drawn on so heavily to produce our report. We are now focused on what to do, having produced our recommendations, how do we implement those recommendations? And I think you’ve touched already on the challenge embedded in that. When people talk about broken systems, I think what they actually mean is that we’re not looking at the beneficiaries of the current system. Systems are very rarely broken, we’re just not noticing who the real beneficiaries are, and I’m really pleased to see you pointing to some of the economic underpinning practices that hold us in our current state. So the big question therefore is, what do we do to shift the conversation away from what is currently almost a reductive polarisation, vegan or animal, or this or that that land use, to focusing our attention on the underpinning economic drivers that are holding us where we are?
Professor Tim Benton
Yeah, good question. So we have spent 70 years, effectively, post-Bretton Wood, post-Second World War, designing a system predicated on the notion that the cheaper we make food, the more available we make food, the more we create a public good. And of course, that has been designed deliberatively, policy, R&D, trade policy, research policy, development of kit for farmers, etc., markets, etc., etc. So it’s a huge monolith, and it’s not that a livestock farmer is a bad boy, a livestock farmer is making a livelihood, trapped in a system, which is difficult to get out of. So, how do you reconfigure the system, given the entrenched power, given the sunk capital, etc., etc., whilst also trying to make it better?
And, you know, Richard Dawkins was one of my Tutors when I was an undergraduate, used to talk about evolution, you know, can you imagine if you’re trying to change a plane, evolution would work by changing a propeller driven plane into a jet plane, changing one bolt at a time, and it has to be better each step of the way, for evolution, to allow that to happen. And of course, that doesn’t – we can’t do that, we can’t necessarily evolve our system easily. So, I think part of the issue, from my perspective is, it looks so difficult that we should be, and Tim Lang often talks about this, the time for policy change is when there is a disruption to the system. And without getting too political, one of the sad things about Brexit is that we’re disrupting the system, and we’re not looking to design it in a way that links trade policy to health policy, to environmental policy, to farming policy.
There is some kind of talk about that, and the new National Food Strategy is trying to put the pieces together, but part of the National Food Strategy, to start off with, was excluding trade, and you can’t think about the food we eat in the UK, without including trade. So, we need to take advantage of these situations, and it might be that we come to our senses and think deliberatively about how we can make our food system better, rather than just make food cheaper. Or it might be that something else happens in five years’ time or ten years’ time, we have another food price spike and we have something else that causes us to reconsider. But it’s not going to be easy, it’s clearly not going to be easy, but the first point is for us to recognise that all of these things are interrelated. Yeah.
Laura Wellesley
I’ll take a question from Rosie and then the gentleman here and then over to you, Tim.
Baroness Rosie Boycott
Rosie Boycott, I sit on Feeding Britain and the Food Foundation and various other things. It’s really ongoing from Sue’s question, in that, I mean, I don’t think you put those slides up at the beginning and saying these are all connected to climate change. That, actually, should be on the front page of our newspapers and it isn’t, they’re still seen as isolationists. So, given that we have against a real cultural problem around things like cheap food, do you think ultimately, we have to legislate, that can we do this culturally, or is it going to be – is it going to require tough, proper action?
Professor Tim Benton
I think the time will come when people will accept the legislation, but I don’t think the time is now, as with the [inaudible – 53:24]. And, you know, everywhere you look around the world there is increasing levels of social disruption and, you know, part of that is because people feel left behind by globalisation. Part of that is for a whole range of different reasons, but then, the potential retrograde step of making familiar and liked foods more expensive or making petrol more expensive, would be really difficult thing politically.
But I mean, one of the reasons I work at Chatham House now is because there is the debate to be had, in the wider community, that I don’t think the academic community is doing enough in, about making these, as I said earlier, politicised in the sense of joining the dots, getting people talking about it, getting people caring about it. Because government won’t act until people say they want to act, and if government acts, then industry will follow. And I was at a working group the other day, where all of the industry representatives was saying, “We would love it, government, if you would legislate because that removes our paralysis about first mover disadvantage,” and all the rest of that. So you tell us that we have to do things in a different way, and we’ll accept it. But until we, as a citizen, say we’re only going to elect Politicians if this is your top three priorities, or whatever.
Laura Wellesley
Can we take this gentleman here and that gentleman there at the same time?
Anthony Newton
Anthony Newton. What do you say to people in Extinction Rebellion, are there aspects of which you agree?
Professor Tim Benton
Yeah, so, they are – whether you like their tactics or not, and actually, I quite enjoyed it when they were camping out here, ‘cause I’d wander around having conversations and, you know, find myself talking to 70 something Doctors, who are out on the streets, living under a canvas, because they’re worried about their grandchildren, and so on. So it’s not just about the politicisation and anarchy of youth. Some of their tactics, obviously, are counterproductive, but the fact that they are getting people to worry about this issue, it’s a positive thing, and as are three or four Ministers at the Climate Change Conference said, you know, “We are in a different place because this is now part of our conversation, whereas five years ago, it wasn’t.”
Donald Shaw
Donald Shaw, and you mentioned earlier increasing incidences of extreme weather and building upon the work, which you did around with the Foreign Commonwealth Office and Molly Jones’ work around multiple bed basket failure. You talked about how we need to shift the food system, but when you’ve got increasing risks, not just climate related, but also, conflict related, where major food system shocks, how are you ensuring you have not just a more efficient global food production system, but a significantly more resilient one, for the new types of shocks that we face in the 21st Century? What do you think both the mitigation measures are and the adaptation ones?
Professor Tim Benton
Well, I increasingly don’t think about mitigation and adaptation, ‘cause they’re often the same thing. So, if, for example, you eat a healthier diet and it’s more diversified, you’re both adapting and mitigating at the same time. So, it’s a really important point, and I think, you know, were we ever to leave Brexit in a hard way, in an unplanned way, it would be a test of the resilience of our food system. Four years ago, we did the Climate Change Risk Assessment, the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, and one of the recommendations in that was, the UK should think about building a more resilient food system. And Government’s response to that at the time was, “We don’t need to ‘cause the market will take it into account.” And recently, somebody from DEFRA came up to me and said, “Actually, we realise that you’re right, because it’s only by going through the process of yellow hammer that we realise how fragile our food system, and we do have to think about the resilience of our food system.”
Now, there are many ways of thinking about building resilience. Diversity is one, because it has many benefits. We could have a more diverse countryside, we could have more diverse diets, we could be more healthy, etc. Thinking about how to store food is expensive, but there are ways of thinking about that, in a public sense. There are ways of thinking about virtual stores of food, and ways of thinking about resilience of the transport infrastructure. So, as an example, one of the issues with maize coming out of the Midwest is not that you have a Midwest drought, but the Mississippi dries up and you can’t get the grain boats down the Mississippi. And then the only way you can get the grain out is by rail, but the rail is actually taking all of the shale oil sands out of that part of – neck of the woods.
So it’s not just about the production of food, it’s about making all of our systems resilient and all the rest of that, whilst minimising some of the long distance transports, ‘cause we don’t want to make our food system resilient by flying in lots of food from Chile, or wherever it might be. So, yeah, but part of the issue is that our food system, however you define it, in terms of efficiency, is really inefficient. Agriculture is really efficient, so, if you are thinking just about calorie conversion into healthy diets, it’s probably under 2% of what is grown, turns into healthy diet. Because so much gets thrown away, so much of it is overeaten, so much of it is fed to livestock, and the trophic losses, etc.
So, we could make our food system more resilient by reducing waste, by changing our eating patterns. And it’s not just the technology of the food stores, changing our desire to have exactly the same thing on the shelves in supermarkets day in, day out, whatever season, etc. If we were a bit more flexible, and you know, it’s interesting ‘cause the retailers say, “Well, we’re only doing what you demand,” and for many of us as consumers and citizens, you’re not kind of aware, it’s not a deliberative thing, we’re kind of conditioned into it. We could behave in a different way, when it comes to thinking about what we want to choose from supermarkets. We don’t need strawberries on Christmas Day. So, part of it is the behavioural response, but part of it is also the technological and market response.
Laura Wellesley
Thank you,. It’s 2 o’clock, so unless anyone has a really, really burning question, no, I’ll bring it to a close, and please join me in thanking Tim for his [applause]…
