Newspapers neglect food impact on climate
Photo: evelynnyll
In recent years, scientists have estimated that agricultural activities – including livestock production and clearing land for farming – contribute 30 percent of the greenhouse gases now warming our planet. But a new study shows that you wouldn’t know it from reading the newspapers.
Roni Neff: Out of 4,582 climate change articles, we found that only 109 even mentioned food and agriculture contributions to climate change. That’s 2.4 percent.
That’s Dr. Roni Neff, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She led a study of thousands of climate change stories published in the 16 largest U.S. newspapers over the past several years.
She said, for example, that only half of one percent of the articles even mentioned the contribution of meat production to global warming. That’s despite the fact that 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from that source.
Roni Neff: I really think it’s important when you see this tremendous gap in newspaper coverage of food contributions to climate change. It’s like there’s a page missing from the manual. Everybody wants to do what they can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re just not hearing about the impacts of food and so they’re not learning all the things they could be doing to make a difference.
Dr. Neff said people can help by eating less red meat, and buying local foods. Neff added that livestock production creates the most greenhouse gases in the food sector, but that only half a percent of the newspapers she studied mentioned livestock contributions. She believes that understanding more about the link between the food we eat and the world around us is important.
Roni Neff: There’s a tremendous opportunity here to make a difference in food as we seek to reduce our overall carbon footprints.
