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Livestock's Long Shadow - Environmental Issues and Options is a United Nations report, released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) on 29 November 2006,[1] that "aims to assess the full impact of the livestock sector on environmental problems, along with potential technical and policy approaches to mitigation". [2]

The assessment is based on the most recent and complete data available, taking into account direct impacts, along with the impacts of feed crop agriculture required for livestock production. The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. The findings of this report suggest that it should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

In the report, senior U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization official Henning Steinfeld reports that the meat industry is "one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems"[3] and that "urgent action is required to remedy the stuation."[4]

Other points the report makes are that the world's livestock industry "generates 65 per cent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2"[5] and "that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport."[6]

[edit] References to the Report

United States ex-Vice President Al Gore was challenged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in a letter dated March 7, 2007 to become a vegan, and cited the Livestock's Long Shadow report as evidence that a change to a vegan diet was the single biggest change an individual could make to counter the effects of climate change.[7] In its letter, PETA noted that Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which outlines the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, failed to mention either the effects of diet or the meat industry on climate change.[8]

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