Changing from meat-dominant diets toward environmental-friendly choices can be difficult for many consumers. Individuals’ bodies, shopping patterns, and cooking styles must alter to include plant-based consumption styles. Knowing the leading advantages of vegan diets helps encourage consumers to make the sustainable transition.
Is going vegan environmentally friendly?
The huge land requirements it takes to manufacture animal products and their feed adversely influence biodiversity. According to a study, our food diet options are important when it comes to climate change. Approximately 15-30% of greenhouse gas emissions originate from the food sector. When it comes to GWP (global warming potential), the food production sector has a much more considerable effect than cooking and transportation.
As such, the land- and resource-intensive nature of manufacturing animal products means that even the Mediterranean diet has adverse regional biodiversity affects approximately three times higher than a vegan diet. Finally, this study showed that a vegan diet was much more suitable than a Mediterranean diet. This is because a vegan diet is both healthier and has minimal environmental effects.
The advantages of going vegan for the environment
1, Decreased Carbon Footprint
Plant-based diets like veganism contribute to the environment by decreasing your carbon footprint by up to 70%. The meat and dairy industry requires a vast amount of resources to make the feed for livestock, high-power machinery to retain their operations within, and an immense quantity of fuel for transferring the animals and shipping the animal-based products. Going vegan will reduce our energy consumption by a remarkable amount.
2. Lower Cattle Farming Pollution
As reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, cattle farming and the dairy industry are in charge of more than 14% of greenhouse gases produced by humans. It pollutes the air, land, and water as long as brings about irreparable harm to the forests and oceans via deforestation and overfishing. By going vegan, we can remove the need for cattle farming. This will eliminate the leading cause of climate change and help us get closer to a greener earth.
3. Water Conservation due to vegan
Livestock and dairy industries consume a ton of water, and in a world where some people cannot even make use of clean drinking water, it actually is selfish of us to squander so much water on something we cannot lead a healthy and pleasurable life without. Fresh water is a very precious resource and we should make sure that it remains accessible to people all over the world. Veganism is the final way to do just that, as, without the demand for livestock, this industry would become smaller, preserving our fresh water supply.
4. Animal-Friendly
Animals are capable of experiencing feelings and sensations and feel pain when cruelly dilled. As the cleverest species on our planet, we should offer pity and kindness towards the animals. We should promise to cause no damage. It’s the minimum we can do for the planet we call home.
5. Combat hunger
Every acre of food cultivated for livestock feed is an acre of food that could be used for feeding one of the world’s many hungry people. As animal agriculture produces such unsustainable demand for the world’s resources, one study estimates that some 36% of the calories created by global farming are employed for animal feed, with only 12% used as part of the human diet.
The meat, dairy, and fishing industries are not only immoral because of their terrible treatment of animals but also because they dispossess the developing world of critical resources such as land, water, and food. The study also shows that growing food directly for human consumption would increase reachable food calories by up to 70%. This would mean sufficient food to give food four billion more people around the world.
6. protect biodiversity due to vegan
Choosing a vegan diet helps safeguard biodiversity across the board. First, animal agriculture damages soil via deforestation and other unsustainable ways of providing for livestock. Second, such deforestation and other environmental depreciation by meat and dairy manufacturers also result unavoidably in habitat loss for wild species. Various types of monkeys, tigers, elephants, bears, lions, and many species of birds are in danger of extermination as their habitats are changed to land for livestock.
Third, farmers slaughter millions of wild animals, including endangered and rare species, each year in an endeavor to safeguard their livestock. This means that birds, wolves, and bobcats, among other animals, are more at risk of extinction because of animal agriculture.
7. help stabilize the ocean
Yes, getting rid of plastic straws is wonderful, and we should all attempt to decrease our plastic use. But if as many people cease eating fish to save fish, well, we’d be in a lot better shape with regard to the health of the oceans.
Overfishing and harming methods of catching and farming fish have completely destroyed the oceans. The entire fish population is just half of what it was fifty years ago in 1970. Unfortunately, demand is only rising. By excluding fish and fish products from your diet, the ocean has a better opportunity to stabilize and naturally refill.
8. It cleans the soil
Similar to how livestock pollutes water, they also erode and debilitate soil. This is to some extent because increasing livestock usually results in deforestation, which empty vast swaths of land of the various elements (such as trees) that create nutrients and resilience, to make room for the livestock to move aimlessly.
The world is deprived approximately of the size of Panama each year of deforestation, which also hastens climate change (trees store carbon). Increasing the diversity of plants, instead, nourishes the soil and results in long-term resilience.
9. A vegan diet decreases energy consumption
Raising livestock consumes a lot of energy. This is because of a broad range of factors including it is a time-taking process to raise animals; they eat a lot of food that was grown on land that could have been put to other use; meat products must be shipped and refrigerated, and meat must leave behind a difficult process from slaughterhouse to kitchen table.
10. Decreasing Methane Emissions due to vegan
When farmers raise cattle to fulfill meat-consumption demands, they create methane emissions. Cattle emit greenhouse gas by belching, polluting the atmosphere throughout their lives. Livestock release roughly 80 million tons of methane into the environment each year. Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, making more severe ecological impacts than carbon dioxide. It has a very considerable heat production rate, increasing the global temperature over time. When individuals select vegan diets, they decrease the demand for cattle farming, reducing metha
