CO2W: how bovines impact on GHG emissions

Riccardo Rorato, Alessandro Arata

When discussing the intensive production of greenhouse gasses and their negative impact on the environment, emissions produced by industries or the intense city traffic are usually mentioned: these sources are not the only heavy producers of greenhouse gases, as even green activities such as farming can produce quite a huge amount of nocive gases for the enviroment.
With a series of visualizations we would like to showcase the impact of farming on the production of greenhouse gases, focusing in particular on the environmental damage produced by bovines.

Most of the data for the visualizations has been taken from the Eurostat climate change database on greenhouse gas emissions, with complementary data coming from Our World in Data, in particular their articles on the land use for foods and on the carbon footprint of food.

The problem of greenhouse gases

A greenhouse gas (GHG) is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range, causing the greenhouse effect. In our atmosphere, the greenhouse effect means an excess of gases that inhibit the exit of thermal energy of the sun after reflection on earth. Human activities since the beginning of the industrial revolution (around 1750) have increased the atmospheric concentration of some gases by over 50%, increasing temperatures by noticeable amounts (estimated +2°C in 2050 at current emission rates). This has an effect on all kinds of enviroments, from melting glaciers, causing more distruptive monsoons and typhoons, increasing heat waves intensity.

Sun with greenhouse effect

The not-so-green agricolture

Agricolture (which includes farming) may sound like a green activity, with little to no emissions since it is so intertwined with the nature. Actually, it is the 4th sector in terms of total GHG emissions, and by far the first when considering Methane (CH₄) and Nitrous Oxide (N₂O). These two gases, despite not having the infamous reputation of CO₂, can be much more longeve and heat-retaining in the atmosphere.

What product to impute to?

Agricolture can be a big sector to analyze as a whole: in order to understand what can be done, let's analyze the estimated quantity of GHG emitted by type of product. Bovines and ruminants in general have in general the biggest GHG emissions by far!

Why is that?

Ruminants have a very very "inefficent" digestive apparatus, in terms of converting food in energy. This means:

The impact of bovines

But wait! I can hear you say: beef is very proteic and caloric, so just one cow can feed many people!
While that is (partially) true, the ratio between final product and land used or GHG emitted is still much
worse when compared to other animals.


Country: Scale by:

Who is doing better?

Actually, no one. Even with small differences, the percentage of CH4 and N2O
from agricolture is very high in all EU countries.


Year:

And it is not getting better

Taking a look a this percentage of some of the most emitting countries thoughout the years,
we can see that it is not decreasing.





What can we do?

How can we change this problematic situation? The best thing we can do individually is to change our diet and consume less meat. This will certainly be more healthy, and (hopefully) bring the market towards a terraing allocation recalibration. But there is no need to go full vegan! As we have seen above, there are many animal-based beef alternatives with just a fraction of impact on nature. Considering a global diet without chicken, fish, diary (and more) we can see a "diminishing return" effect: we completely alter our diet (unlikely to happen) without such a big benefit in terms of emissions.