Even if the world weans itself from fossil fuels, the climate story will continue to overheat our atmosphere. Transition towards quitting fossil fuels may have begun, with nations and corporations with their net-zero commitments, but emissions of greenhouse gases are unlikely to be curtailed anytime soon. But the climate story will continue unabated. With overall food system generating about one-third of global emissions, it is FOOD that is as big a climate challenge as OIL. Even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, food production alone would account for emissions to increase global temperature by 2°C before 2100.
Climate change impacts are already making the problem hard to fix. The earth’s twin abilities to produce food and to store carbon are at a cross purpose. Producing more food means more land to be cleared for cultivation at the cost of losing natural carbon storehouses. This means the carbon dioxide the land could absorb if it weren’t used for crop production. Studies project that total demand for more farmlands could amount to 10 million square kilometers by 2050, equivalent to the size of Canada. In climate context, this will amount to colossal waste, as land is the vast reservoir of carbon - holding three times as the atmosphere and four times as much as above-ground vegetation. If the Paris climate summit target has to be met, the world will need to eliminate three-fourths of food-related emissions by 2050. But instead of preserving land to sequester emissions, it is about what is called ‘eating-the-earth’ problem.
It is now clear that the world has to get more out of the earth without using more of the earth. Mark Twain had rightly remarked, they are not making more of it. The land problem is mostly an agriculture problem (We Are Eating the Earth by Michael Grunwald). The land used to live, learn, work, and play is just a fraction of the land that is used to cultivate food. The farming sprawl is thirty times that of the urban sprawl, the size of Asia plus Europe have already been converted into farmland. The issue at the core is the expanding agricultural footprints which is at enormous cost to our best defenses against climate change. That would account for more forests and other natural carbon storehouses.
The food system itself is not climate friendly, and probably the most destructive. Every piece of land needs to be valued either as a potential food source or a potential carbon sink. Either way it is ‘carbon’ that is at the center. To return atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels of 1750, soils would need to absorb 680 billion tons (Regenesis by George Monbiot). However, sucking up of carbon isn’t a linear phenomenon and much still remains to be known. What could be done in theory is not the same as what can be done in practice. To address the uncertainty, ‘Four Per Thousand’ global campaign has been launched to increase the carbon content uniformly in farm soils by 0.4 percent. While tropical and temperate soils significantly vary in their carbon sucking capacity, in theory it can help trap 89 percent of agricultural emissions.
Fossil fuels have been conceived as the biggest problem while the eating-the-earth remains under-publicized and under-understood. The fossil fuel problem is getting better understood but not others. Critical is to learn what went wrong when and how, before solutions could be prescribed. The human destruction of nature began a long time before the industrial revolution (The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith). Way back in the year 1208, the Charter of Forests (issued by England’s King Henry III) became the written law that acknowledged human freedom to exploit natural resources. Till the advent of industrial revolution, the benign climate and rainfall allowed both imperial and colonial forces to clear land, expand cultivation, and build cities. Not much seems to change since then.
While quitting fossil fuel could only be part of the solution, the challenging task is the need to preserve ecosystems that sequester carbon. It is in this regard that beef could be avoided as it uses more land for producing less. One cow meat is as much as 100 chickens, emitting 50 times more greenhouse gases than coal. Given that there are multiple reasons contributing to climate change, there cannot be one solution to fix the problem. It has thus been realized that changing the consumption pattern of 8 billion people and the production pattern of 600 million will be extremely complex. Only systemic changes can stop frying the planet, guilt-trapping people into individual actions may have modest impacts. Undoubtably, food is now as big a climate challenge as oil and coal. While the farms that feed the world might not consume the entire earth, it makes two-fifths of our planet’s land vulnerable. The challenging task ahead is to produce more food per acre alongside restoring unproductive lands to nature. Each of us is eating the earth but how we eat matters.
First published in Hindustan Times on Aug 26, 2026
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