https://www.theguardian.com/environment/...ate-crisis
Half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife, according to a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government.
Prof Sir Ian Boyd said such a change could mean the amount of cattle and sheep would fall by 90%, with farmers instead being paid for storing carbon dioxide, helping prevent floods and providing beautiful landscapes where people could boost their health and wellbeing.
Boyd said the public were subsidising the livestock industry to produce huge environmental damage. The professor spent seven years at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs before stepping down in August. Half of farmland, mostly uplands and pasture, produces just 20% of the UK’s food and would be better for used other public goods, he said.
Boyd, who became vegetarian during his time in Defra, said farmers were potentially “sitting on a goldmine” in terms of the payments they could receive for growing trees and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
While I like the idea of helping the environment, this honestly sounds too radical to me. We've got quite a high population density as it is, and we need that farmland to have anything resembling self-sufficiency for food. Sure, we can buy in food from foreign countries; however, if those trade links ever get severed for one reason or another, then we'd just be screwing ourselves over by doing something like this . (Not to mention, farms in those foreign countries may not be as eco-friendly as British farms, and shipping the food in has environmental costs in and of itself - so, if the goal here is to help the environment, then this seems to be a completely backwards way of going about it )
Maybe it'll be viable in the future, if something like vertical farming takes off... but, for now, I honestly don't see this being workable .
Half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife, according to a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government.
Prof Sir Ian Boyd said such a change could mean the amount of cattle and sheep would fall by 90%, with farmers instead being paid for storing carbon dioxide, helping prevent floods and providing beautiful landscapes where people could boost their health and wellbeing.
Boyd said the public were subsidising the livestock industry to produce huge environmental damage. The professor spent seven years at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs before stepping down in August. Half of farmland, mostly uplands and pasture, produces just 20% of the UK’s food and would be better for used other public goods, he said.
Boyd, who became vegetarian during his time in Defra, said farmers were potentially “sitting on a goldmine” in terms of the payments they could receive for growing trees and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
While I like the idea of helping the environment, this honestly sounds too radical to me. We've got quite a high population density as it is, and we need that farmland to have anything resembling self-sufficiency for food. Sure, we can buy in food from foreign countries; however, if those trade links ever get severed for one reason or another, then we'd just be screwing ourselves over by doing something like this . (Not to mention, farms in those foreign countries may not be as eco-friendly as British farms, and shipping the food in has environmental costs in and of itself - so, if the goal here is to help the environment, then this seems to be a completely backwards way of going about it )
Maybe it'll be viable in the future, if something like vertical farming takes off... but, for now, I honestly don't see this being workable .
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