Alt proteins for food security, better environment and land

A GFI factsheet

The World Bank (May 2024)

Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System (full report; 1-pager)

• Alternative proteins are ranked #2 out of 26 food and agriculture-related interventions by GHG mitigation potential at 6.1 Gt/CO2eq per year, outranked only by afforestation/reforestation.
• APs have nine times more mitigation potential than the second most promising intervention to improve meat production (improved ruminant feed digestibility, at 680 MtCO2eq per year).

United Nations Environment Programme (Dec. 2023) - 18 authors, incl. former IPCC chair Sir Robert Watson
What’s cooking: An assessment of the potential impacts of [alternative proteins] (full report; 1-pager)

• Finds that alternative proteins have climate, biodiversity, and global health benefits over conventional animal products.
• Calls for govt. support for research and scaling, and international cooperation on both science and regulatory oversight.

Innovation Commission: Climate Change, Food Security, Agriculture (Dec. 2023)

Innovation Case for COP28: Alternative proteins (full report; 1-pager)

• Nobel Laureate in economics Michael Kremer’s commission at the University of Chicago finds that alternative proteins can: 1) relieve food insecurity by lowering food prices; 2) decrease direct climate emissions; 3) alleviate malnutrition; & 4) provide a more climate adaptive way of producing protein.
• Governments and philanthropies should fund alt proteins research, to take advantage of all these benefits.

The Center for Strategic & International Studies (May 2023)

Mitigating Risk and Capturing Opportunity: The Future of Alternative Proteins (full report; 1-pager)

• Finds that alternative proteins have climate, biodiversity, and global health benefits over conventional animal products.
• Calls for the U.S. government to fund science and scaling, comparing alternative proteins to biopharma and advanced chips for artificial intelligence in terms of national security and economic benefits.

Int’l Inst. for Applied Systems Analysis, Nature Communications (Sep. 2023)

Feeding climate & biodiversity goals with novel plant-based meat & milk alternatives (full paper; 1-pager)

• At 50% alternative proteins: 1) 6.3 Gt CO2eq/year emissions reduction; 2) global agricultural area, instead of expanding, declines by 12% (653 Mha of land released); 3) water use declines by 10% (−291 km3) instead of increasing; 4) reduction of forest and natural land almost fully halted.
• “Our main results are based on conservative assumptions about processing and hence the benefits could be even higher if a more efficient processing scenario is realized.”

Global Methane Hub & ClimateWorks Foundation (Apr. 2023)

Global Innovation Needs Assessment: Food System Methane (full reports; 1-pager)

• Alternative protein investments from governments could generate $700b in GDP and 83 millions jobs. Across all agricultural methane interventions (food loss & waste; rice methane interventions; livestock interventions; and alternative proteins), 98% of the economic benefits and two-thirds of the jobs accrue to alternative proteins.
• See also: Climate Advisers (2023) (only alternative proteins have significant promise as an agricultural methane mitigation strategy on a global scale) & PNAS (2022) (reviewed 98 mitigation strategies across 430 peer review publications and found: 1. Adoption barriers will likely prohibit livestock interventions from reaching their full technical potential; 2. even at 100% adoption, increased consumption of ruminants will more than offset mitigation benefits).

ClimateWorks Foundation & UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Nov. 2021)

Global Innovation Needs Assessment: Protein Diversification (full report; 1-pager)

• Governments will need to invest $4.4 billion/year in research and development and $5.7 billion/year in private sector incentives to reach 50 percent market penetration by 2050. At this penetration, the mitigation potential of alternative proteins is 5 Gt/CO2eq per year by 2050, with a 5.5T economic value of this climate savings.