Meat, Dairy and Climate Change: Assessing the Long-Term Mitigation Potential of Alternative Agri-Food Consumption Patterns in Canada

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Erik Frenette ; Olivier Bahn ; Kathleen Vaillancourt
• 关键词：Food consumption patterns ; Policy analysis ; Consumer behaviour ; Climate change ; Energy sector modelling
• 刊名：Environmental Modeling & Assessment
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：22
• 期：1
• 页码：1-16
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Earth and Environmental Science
• 刊物主题：Math. Appl. in Environmental Science; Mathematical Modeling and Industrial Mathematics; Operation Research/Decision Theory; Applications of Mathematics;
• 出版者：Springer International Publishing
• ISSN：1573-2967
• 卷排序：22

文摘

We use a newly developed model of the entire Canadian energy system (TIMES-Canada) to assess the climate change mitigation potential of different agri-food consumption patterns in Canada. For this, our model has been extended by disaggregating the agricultural demand sector into individual agri-food demands to allow for a more in-depth analysis. Besides a business-as-usual (baseline) scenario, we have constructed four different agri-food scenarios to assess the viability of reducing Canadian meat and dairy consumption in order to diminish Canada’s agricultural sector energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Our policy scenarios progressively restrict the consumption of different meat and dairy agricultural products until the year 2030. Our results suggest that the implementation of a meat and dairy consumption reduction policy would lead to a 10 to 40 % reduction in agricultural GHG emissions, depending on the severity of the scenario. This translates to a 1 to 3 % decrease in total Canadian GHG emissions by the year 2030. Besides these environmental benefits, health benefits associated with a reduction in meat and dairy consumption (as inferred from other studies) are presented as an additional source of motivation for implementing such a policy in Canada.