Eating and Shopping: Daily Habits and Climate Change

As the world gets richer, we are buying and eating a lot more stuff . This has not been good for the planet . Let’s take a look at some of the easiest ways we can reduce this as individuals.

Food and diet

26% of global man-made greenhouse gas emissions come from the production and consumption of food . But not all foods are equal:

To reduce our diet’s carbon footprint the best thing we can do is to adopt a largely plant-based diet . The graph below shows the impact that different diets could have .

What about processing and transport emissions?

People often worry about how far the food they eat has traveled . But transport of food only makes up a small amount of the industry’s overall emissions (5.1% in the US) .

It turns out that transport distance is a fairly poor indicator of how bad for the environment our food actually is, because other sources of emissions like storage and production are far more important . For example, transportation only accounts for 1% of emissions from beef !

How does fashion affect the environment?

And yet demand for clothes continues to increase :

The best thing individuals can do is to buy clothes less often, but for real change we need changes in practice within the whole industry .

How can we make our housing more green?

Ensuring our homes have double glazing and loft insulation makes them more energy efficient - this could save the average gas-heated home in the UK 0.6 tonnes CO₂ and £184 every year .

Another high-impact action you can choose is switching to a clean electricity supplier. On average, this can save 1.5 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per person .

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