\n<\/p>\n
Food and agriculture contribute one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions \u2013 second only to the burning of fossil fuels. And yet the vast majority of media coverage of the climate crisis overlooks this critical sector, according to a new data analysis from Sentient Media.<\/p>\n
The findings suggest that only about a quarter of climate articles in 11 major US outlets, including the Guardian, mention food and agriculture as a cause. And of the 940 articles analyzed, only 36 \u2013 or 3.8% \u2013 mentioned animal agriculture or meat production, by far the largest source of food-related emissions.<\/p>\n
The data reveals a media environment that obscures a key driver of the climate crisis. Meat production alone is responsible for nearly 60% of the food sector\u2019s climate emissions and yet its impact is sorely underestimated: a 2023 Washington Post\/University of Maryland poll found 74% of US respondents believe eating less meat has little to no effect on the climate crisis.<\/p>\n
Sentient Media analyzed the most recent online articles about climate change from 11 major U.S. outlets \u2013 the Guardian, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, CNN, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, New York Times, Reuters, Star Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Opinion pieces, syndicated stories, and articles that mention climate change only in passing were excluded.<\/p>\n
The final group of 940 stories was collected using artificial intelligence and then reviewed individually for accuracy. Of all the causes surveyed in the report, including mining, manufacturing, and energy production (55.9%); fossil fuels (47.9%); and transportation (34%), livestock and meat consumption were by far discussed the least.<\/p>\n
Sentient Media\u2019s editor-in-chief, Jenny Splitter, who helped oversee the report, said she had long noticed the omission as a reporter covering the intersection of climate and food. \u201cWe thought one way to start the conversation with other journalists and newsrooms was to put some numbers to the question,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director and co-founder of Covering Climate Now, a non-profit that helps newsrooms strengthen their climate reporting, said daily news outlets struggle to emphasize the deeper root causes of climate change \u2013 often focusing on incremental updates over the larger why.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not necessarily nefarious,\u201d he said. \u201cBut as the climate crisis has accelerated, it is increasingly indefensible for news coverage of climate change not to make it clear that this crisis is driven by very specific human activities \u2013 primarily burning fossil fuels. And in second place is food, agriculture, forestry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hertsgaard, who has reported on the climate crisis since 1990, said food and agriculture had long been a \u201cgross oversight\u201d in climate circles. The United Nations climate change summit had no dedicated agriculture focus until 2015, reflecting its neglected status in the world of policymakers, thinktanks, and NGOs \u2013 which contributed into the media\u2019s illiteracy on the topic, Hertsgaard said.<\/p>\n
Dhanush Dinesh, the founder of the food-systems focused thinktank Clim-Eat, said climate organizations sometimes shy away from the topic due to food\u2019s fraught cultural status, which may have helped to keep it from the media spotlight.<\/p>\n
When you eat a burger, you\u2019re not just eating a cow … You\u2019re eating the Amazon. You\u2019re eating the earth.Michael Grunwald, journalist<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody wants to put themselves out there and tell people what to eat \u2013 it\u2019s just too sensitive,\u201d he said. \u201cEven within the [climate advocacy] space, we see it\u2019s quite polarizing.\u201d<\/p>\n
That tension isn\u2019t always so organic. When a 2019 report published by the Lancet showed how reduced-meat diets could feed the world without causing environmental breakdown, an industry-backed coalition helped to fund some of the backlash against it. Beef industry groups take an active approach to messaging, including staffing a 24\/7 \u201ccommand center\u201d in Denver that scans social media for negative stories and deploys counter-messaging.<\/p>\n
Journalist Michael Grunwald said that the food conversation today is lagging about twenty years behind the energy and fossil fuels conversation. He spent years covering climate issues for outlets including Time, Politico and the Washington Post before he started to see the links between the food on our plates and changes in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know squat,\u201d he said. \u201cHere\u2019s this important part of the climate equation that I was spectacularly ignorant about. And I realized others probably were, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The planet’s most important stories. Get all the week’s environment news – the good, the bad and the essential<\/p>\n
Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Grunwald\u2019s new book, We Are Eating the Earth, unpacks how dietary choices shape the planet\u2019s surface, playing a massive role in its ultimate fate. That is in part because ruminant livestock \u2013 particularly cattle \u2013 are a major source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that warms the planet 80 times faster than carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n But feeding billions of farm animals also takes up a lot of space. Half of the earth\u2019s habitable land is already devoted to agriculture, and most of that \u2013 about 80% \u2013 is grazing pasture and cropland for animal feed, making meat consumption a major driver of deforestation globally. Today, we clear a soccer field\u2019s worth of tropical forest every six seconds, a loss dramatically worsened by humanity\u2019s growing hunger for meat.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you eat a burger, you\u2019re not just eating a cow,\u201d Grunwald said. \u201cYou\u2019re eating macaws and jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio. You\u2019re eating the Amazon. You\u2019re eating the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n And yet this toll tends to be broadly misunderstood, when it is not ignored altogether. Only about 15% of stories analyzed Sentient Media mention land-use changes in connection with the climate crisis.<\/p>\n Princeton senior researcher Timothy Searchinger has spent decades making the case that we cannot solve the climate issue without rethinking how we use land.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery tree, after you take out the water, is about 50% carbon. So forests store vast quantities of carbon,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we continue to clear forests, we have the capability to dramatically increase climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n That conversion of forest into agricultural land takes an unthinkable toll, responsible globally for as much carbon emissions each year as the entire United States. Meanwhile, the global population is expected to grow from 8 billion to 10 billion by 2050. So fixing the climate crisis will mean growing more food with fewer emissions on the same amount of land \u2013 or, ideally, even less land.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s kind of no way to solve the land use problems in the world unless there is moderation of diets \u2013 meat consumption, particularly beef \u2013 in the developed world,\u201d Searchinger said.<\/p>\n If ruminant meat consumption in wealthy countries such as the US declined to about 1.5 burgers per person per week \u2013 about half what it is now, still well over the national average for most countries \u2013 that alone would nearly eliminate the need for additional deforestation due to agricultural expansion, even in a world with 10 billion people, according to an analysis by the World Resources Institute.<\/p>\n Though she acknowledges the 3.8% figure is low, Jessica Fanzo, a professor of climate at Columbia University, said she didn\u2019t blame media as much as the challenge of translating scientific consensus into real action \u2013 a structural gridlock that\u2019s made progress, and therefore storytelling, more difficult.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernments are reluctant to push hard on dietary change, livestock emissions, or fertilizer dependence because they trigger cultural sensitivities and risk political backlash,\u201d she said, by email. She also said it is difficult to take action on the vast, decentralized agricultural sector. Climate advocate and author Bill McKibben agreed, pointing out in emailed comments that 20 fossil fuel companies are responsible for much of the world\u2019s emissions, whereas food comes down to the actions of millions of farmers.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, US agriculture policy is mostly geared toward ramping up commodity grain and animal-feed production through subsidies \u2013 an approach that prioritizes cheap calories over reducing carbon emissions. And available demand-side solutions, such as meat taxes or meatless Mondays at public schools, risk touching a cultural third rail.<\/p>\n But in this divided environment, media can play a crucial role, said David McBey, a University of Aberdeen behavioral scientist focused on diet-climate links.<\/p>\n \u201cInformation campaigns don\u2019t change behavior,\u201d he said. \u201cBut they do lay an important bedrock. If you want behavior to change, it\u2019s important that people know why<\/em> it should change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Food and agriculture contribute one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions \u2013 second only to the burning of fossil fuels. And yet the vast majority of media coverage of the climate crisis overlooks this critical sector, according to a new data analysis from Sentient Media. The findings suggest that only about a quarter of climate articles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[3892,191,189,867,5226,4712,10759,14751,293,2653],"class_list":{"0":"post-24242","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-analysis","9":"tag-emissions","10":"tag-finds","11":"tag-gas","12":"tag-greenhouse","13":"tag-leading","14":"tag-meat","15":"tag-outlets","16":"tag-report","17":"tag-source"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}