“The need to strengthen the resolve of the people to lessen their carbon footprint has never been as important and as urgent today. Especially so, that we made some headway in our effort to fight climate change during the long period of community quarantines brought by the pandemic”, says Tirso P. Parian Jr., Regional Executive Director of DENR in Region VIII.
In particular, the DENR is pushing for a change in the Filipino diet by switching to plant-based diet as an effective measure to lessen the ecological footprint of human food consumption which coincides with the nationwide celebration of July as Nutrition Month.
To initiate some traction to the call, a month-long public information drive was launched and is being spearheaded by the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) dubbed as “Plant-Based Solutions for Climate Change”. Core to the campaign message is to encourage the public to include more vegetables and fruits into their diet as recommended by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI) in proportion with three main food groups of “go, grow and glow foods”.
For EMB in Region VIII, as early as April this year during the celebration of Month of the Planet Earth, they initiated an activity with similar objective which dubbed as “EMB 8’s Home Gardening”, where they distributed vegetable seeds to their employees and encouraged them to plant vegetables in their homes. The produce of which, they will donate to poor communities together with additional seeds for them to plant. It perfectly coincides to the objectives of the current “Plant-Based Solutions for Climate Change” campaign.
“Instead of dole-out activities, the challenge is for the people themselves to plant and grow vegetables then learn to share the seeds to other members of their respective communities. In a way, we encourage them to make vegetables a main component of their diet and in effect, reduce their carbon footprints,” says Ms. Letecia R. Maceda, Regional Director of EMB-8.
According to the 2013 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, meat and dairy—particularly from cows—account for around 14.5 percent of the global greenhouse gases each year. That’s roughly the same amount as emissions from all the cars, trucks, airplanes and ships in the world combined.
A recent study by the University of Oxford suggested that cutting meat and dairy products from a person’s diet could reduce his carbon footprint from food by up to 73 percent.
As shared by Brent Logan, global food lead of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and author of Diet for a Better Future Report, producing food for Earth’s 7.7 billion people is responsible for a quarter of the global carbon emissions that drive climate change. From that, about 40 percent comes from livestock production and food waste, with the rest generated by rice production, fertilizer use, land conversion and deforestation to accommodate commercial crops.
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- Parent Category: News & Events
- Category: Press Releases
- Published: 22 July 2020