Can Vegetarianism Save The Planet?

Solar power. Electric Cars. Recycling. There are many, many ways that we can reduce our impact on the environment, and with the ubiquitous threat of climate change, it’s becoming ever more important that we all do our bit to help the planet. One way of ‘going green’ is to turn vegetarian or at least cut down on the amount of meat that we eat. This isn’t just an animal rights issue (that’s a different argument for a different day) but rather an environmental one. If everyone were to completely cut meat out of their diet, it could potentially have incredibly positive effects on the planet. The below infographic from Arbtech looks at this in a little more detail, examining what the effects would be on various aspects of the environment, including carbon footprint and water supply.

It compares the carbon emissions for producing various types of foods, looks at what wood happen to agriculture, and the effect on water supply around the world. Interestingly, it also looks at what would happen to our health, the results of which are actually pretty surprising and suggest that if we cut out meat then we’d actually live longer.

John Vidal of The Guardian recently wrote a very interesting article on this very topic and looked at what we should be doing when it comes to eating meat to help reduce the impact on the environment. John goes into detail about how producing meat for consumption has a detrimental effect on available land, deforestation, air quality, health of the oceans, oil supply, our health, and other issues. It’s an excellent companion article to Arbtech’s infographic and shows that this is a bigger issue that perhaps a lot people actually realise.

Would this make you think twice about eating meat or do you think it’s not as big a problem as people are making it out to be?