The Little Book of Low Carbon Eating in The City

Since 2008, more than half of the world population has lived in cities. The global urban population is expected to keep growing, and by 2050, 6.4 billion people are expected to live in urban areas. Cities are places of opportunity, wealth creation and employment, where the high concentration of people translates into high levels of resource consumption and both direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions. Direct emissions are those created within the city, for instance by vehicles and boilers. Indirect emissions are all those embedded in goods and services produced outside the city boundaries for consumption within the city, as their production is driven by the demand occurring in urban areas. This applies to food, a ubiquitous commodity, which needs to be produced elsewhere and then transported and distributed constantly within cities to make sure that supermarket aisles, restaurants and cafes are always fully stocked. When talking about the causes of climate change, food consumption is often the elephant in the room, even though it has been estimated that between 30 and 35% of human-made greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are caused by agriculture alone (Foley et al., 2011). This applies also to cities. In the few cases where a city’s emissions for consumption have been estimated (as opposed to only the emissions produced within the city boundaries), food consumption was found to be responsible for approximately 20% of the total emissions- this value is comparable with the greenhouse gases emitted by household energy use or private transport.1 This is why a cheap and relatively easy way to reduce a city’s contribution to climate change is by encouraging all its citizens to shift to low carbon diets and to reduce the amount of food they waste (as throwing away food is very inefficient from an environmental, social and economic point of view). Reducing carbon emissions is just one of the reasons why there is a driving need for people in rich countries like ours to change what and how we eat. However, there are a number of other pressing reasons: for example, from an environmental perspective, food production contributes to water scarcity, deforestation, soil erosion and desertification, and represents a threat to biodiversity. Furthermore, from a public health perspective, non-communicable diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, which are strongly linked to diet and which are commonly related to over- and mal-consumption of food, are one of the main causes of premature death. As Tim Lang (2017) points out, 65% of the global population lives in countries where being overweight or obese kills more people than being underweight or malnourished. Obviously, all of this adds huge external costs to the economy. Parts of civil society, the academic world and some governments have started to believe that by identifying and promoting the necessary shifts in food consumption, these problems can be addressed together.

source :

https://blog.soton.ac.uk/serg/files/2017/12/littlebookoflowcarboneatinginthecity.pdf