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Governments urged to promote plant-based diet as action to tackle global warming

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Researchers from Lund University considered a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculated their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries.

They found that governments are not promoting the most effective steps to tackle climate change and are therefor missing an opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beneath the levels needed to prevent 2Â°C of climate warming.

The journal Environmental Research Letters published their findings this week, which identified "four actions that could result in substantial decreases in an individualâ€™s carbon footprint: eating a plant-based diet, avoiding air travel, living car free, and having smaller families,â€ said lead author Seth Wynes of Lund University in Sweden.

Eating a plant-based diet saves 0.8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year,

saves 0.8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, Avoiding air travel saves about 1.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per trip,

saves about 1.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per trip, Living car-free saves about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year,

saves about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, And by far the biggest action was having one less child, which saves an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emission reductions per year, the report said.

A "family who chooses to have one fewer child would provide the same level of emissions reductions as 684 teenagers who choose to adopt comprehensive recycling for the rest of their lives,â€ it said.

These four actions to tackle anthropogenic climate change were based on consideration from a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources.

When researchers reviewed which anti-carbon actions were promoted in various western countries, they found a general focus on â€œincremental changes with much smaller potential to reduce emissionsâ€ such as using green energy and comprehensive recycling. Just adopting a plant-based diet would be in itself eight and four times more effective respectively.

Streamlining the message from schools and from governments could make major steps toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions beneath the levels needed to keep the planet under 2 degrees Celsius of climate warming, researchers said.

â€œThere are so many factors that affect the climate impact of personal choices, but bringing all these studies side-by-side gives us confidence weâ€™ve identified actions that make a big difference,â€ said Wynes.

Read the report: The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions