UN Climate Summit & Meat Free Mondays

There's certainly been lots going on in the climate change front over the last week. I find this extremely exciting, especially as a recent graduate in the climate change field. It's really wonderful to see that both individuals and international governments are taking climate change seriously, are pushing for action, and are acknowledging that it isn't a "far-away" problem. The world-wide demonstrations preceding the UN emergency Climate Summit in New York last weekend were truly inspiring - and it looks like governments have heard us. For those of you that aren't familiar with the 2014 UN Climate Change Summit, below is a short summary (a longer one can be found here on the UN website):

-The purpose of the summit was to "raise political momentum for a meaningful universal climate agreement in Paris 2015 and to galvanize transformative action in all countries to reduce emissions and build resilience to the adverse impacts of climate change".

-Leaders from government, business, and civil society were asked to build a global vision for low-carbon economic growth and to advance climate action via various pathways.

-The main points of discussion for the global vision on climate change were the following: convergence on a long-term vision; cutting emissions; moving markets and mobilizing money; pricing carbon; strengthening resilience; and mobilizing new coalitions.  

-100 Heads of State and Government attended the Summit.

What does all this climate change talk have to do with food? Well, as we've talked about in previous posts, the food industry is heavily intertwined in our complex climate change problem. On the one side, large-scale food production is a dominant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contributor, and therefore a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change (Vermeulen, 2012). On the other side, climate change threatens global food production through its negative effects such as drought and limiting water resources (IPCC, 2007). 

Something else really exciting happened this week. Ahead of the UN Climate Summit, Sir Paul McCartney released an original song, Meat Free Monday, in order to promote his campaign on the reduction of meat consumption to combat climate change.  You can listen to the song in the video below - I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did! If you're interested in pledging your support for this campaign, you can do so here. 

Progress Report

Having reached the halfway point of the term, I thought it'd be nice to take a step back and have a look at what we've covered here so far. 

The objective that I set out at the beginning of this blogging experience was to examine the environmental impacts of global food production through time. To do this, it was first necessary to understand the origins of agriculture (e.g. Bar Yosef, 1998; Price & Bar Yosef, 2011; Zeder, 2011)  and the environmental impacts associated with the Neolithic Revolution (e.g. Zeder, 2008; Zhou et al., 2011). We are now going to fast-forward several millennia to quickly examine the environmental impacts of the industrial revolution with respect to agriculture. After that, the remainder of the posts will deal with what has been referred to as the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2007). We will examine how agricultural production has boomed over the past century to meet the needs of a rapidly growing global population and how this expansion has altered the environment.

During our very first lecture in Global Environmental Change, Professor Mackay showed us a Wordle he had made on the Internationalisation of Science and Technology. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wordles, they work by assigning different sizes to words from a certain text to denote their importance. Larger words are those that showed up repeatedly throughout the text, while smaller words were those that didn't show up as much. I created the above Wordle using the entirety of the text in Picnics Past and Present to date. The words that showed up the most were food, agriculture, environmental, and diet. 

To evaluate the progress of this blog's content and how it's keeping in line with these objectives, I'll repeat the same exercise in the new year. I'm very interested to see how the picture will change!

I'll be back as promised to introduce the industrial revolution in terms of global food production. Thanks for reading, and have a lovely weekend!