The UN’s recently launched ‘decade on ecosystem restoration’ project says that the world must restore and reforest an area equivalent in size to China to prevent ecosystem collapse. One of the challenges they say is finding the imagination to come up with solutions, yet from their own ideas, one source of land for rewilding is conspicuously absent: animal agriculture.

‘Decade on ecosystem restoration’ is a bold call-to-action from the United Nations, calling on the world’s governments to go further than current conservation efforts and look to large-scale restoration of ecosystems. In short, rewilding, turning back the clock on localised environments and reviving their natural pasts before being ravaged by human actions.

“Restoration needs to be seen as an infrastructure investment in a country’s well being. We need imagination,” Tim Christophersen, coordinator of the decade on ecosystem restoration told the Guardian. “For many people, I think restoring a billion hectares is a bit abstract. We have decades of experience of how this could work but never on the scale we’re talking about. We have space programmes and nuclear weapons – it is possible.”

The website identifies a number of types of ecosystems where rewilding is possible to meet international commitments to restore 2.47 billion acres of land by 2030, including shrublands, urban areas and oceans. While farmlands are included in that list, the focus is almost entirely on arable farming with a cursory mention of overgrazing. Monocultures and use of fertilisers and pesticides have a great deal to answer for, but the gross understating of the role of animal agriculture in the greatest ecological problem we’ve ever faced is perplexing.

As discussed in the latest Surge video - Veganism could save the planet. Here's why - the UN’s own Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) summed up the scale of the problem of animal agriculture in its Livestock's long shadow report from 2016:

“The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”

Just four years later, another UN body, the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP), stated that “a substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.” 

UNEP was commenting on animal agriculture in the context of preventing hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change on humans, while ‘decade on ecosystem restoration’ is more about the natural world around us, but it is clear from all that the UN has said, and continues to say today, that the effects of animal farming are both extensive and entirely disproportionate when we consider how little it actually feeds our populations compared to plant-based agriculture. Globally, a quarter of the world’s land not covered by ice is used to graze animals, while 83 per cent of all farming land is used for animals in some way. Yet animal agriculture gives us no more than 20 per cent of our dietary calories, and less than 40 per cent of our protein.

As for where we’re going to find an area of land the size of China to rewild, the impression we’re given is that we’re to look under every rock and scrape together patches of ecosystem from everywhere including city parks and up mountains. Yet what about the enormous elephant in the room? 

“...if the world shifted to a plant-based diet, we could feed every mouth on the planet and global farmland could also be reduced by more than 75 per cent, which, when put into perspective, is the equivalent size of China, Australia, the US and the entire European Union combined no longer being needed for agriculture. We could reforest and restore this land, bringing back lost habitats and reversing the decimation of the world’s biodiversity,” said Surge co-director Ed Winters in our recent video on why exactly animal agriculture is so bad for the planet.

These land estimates are based on figures from the University of Oxford research article Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers, published in the journal Science in 2018, the lead author of which went on to later state publicly in the Guardian that “a vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use.”

To make it clear, shifting away from animal agriculture wouldn’t only give us the land the UN now says must be rewilded and with all the energy and concerted political effort of a space race, but land the size of Australia, the US and the EUtoo that if restored would also remove an estimated 8.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, or roughly 15 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The UN is calling for imagination and political motivation, but for some strange reason has failed to exercise either in not addressing animal agriculture specifically - probably a reluctance to create political resistance from industry lobbyists. But the farming of animals should be top of the list. Why call on the world’s governments to scrimp and scrape patches of various ecosystems when shutting down animal agriculture for good would solve our problems and more? 

No one claims that ending animal agriculture and repurposing land will be an easy task, but even if it was equally complex to the UN’s latest rewilding proposals - all of which call for advancements in restoration science and agroforestry - the many knock-on benefits to public health and the prevention of further pandemics make it, quite simply, a no-brainer.

To find out why exactly animal agriculture is terrible for the environment, including all the facts and figures above and more in regards to its ecological impact, watch our latest video:

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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