Shifting to healthy diets could mitigate half of China's agricultural emissions
Estimated figures based on three dietary guidelines
If China shifted to widespread adoption of healthy diets, it would reduce agricultural emissions by 51%. An ongoing win-win is that healthy diets are also more sustainable.
I made this quick graph from data in a great study, ‘The impacts of healthy diets on future greenhouse gas emissions in China’ from Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) - which you can find here. For clarity, these are the 2022 Chinese Dietary Guidelines
Lots of great findings in this report, including that 68% of the total agricultural emissions reductions in China could be achieved by tackling methane emissions. In all of the models, the majority of methane emissions come from livestock (enteric fermentation and manure).
Unhealthy diets are the main driver of ill-health globally. Changing to more healthy diets would benefit populations as well as reducing carbon emissions.