100+ groups and leading experts challenge the FAO to take lower-meat diets seriously

A UN report launched at COP28 contained major errors downplaying the huge emissions saving potential of lower-meat diets – an embarrassing error, or bowing to the livestock industry?

Feedback has coordinated a joint-letter signed by over 100 organisations and leading experts from around the world, calling on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to urgently retract a report because it contains serious errors, which significantly understate the emissions saving potential of shifts to lower-meat diets – playing into the livestock industry.

The FAO made its misleading claims based mainly on two scientific papers. But here’s the problem: earlier this year, two of the academics who co-authored those papers called on the FAO to retract the report for seriously distorting their work. The academic experts Paul Behrens and Matthew Hayek identified serious errors in the FAO report, saying to the Guardian “The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious, conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be. None of the mistakes had the opposite effect.”

The scale of this distortion is staggering – Behrens and Hayek estimate that the emissions mitigation from dietary change in line with the EAT-Lancet diet is between 6 and 40 times higher than the FAO’s estimates!

How did the FAO get it so wrong? Some of the mistakes committed by the FAO are embarrassingly basic and objectively wrong – like double-counting meat emissions, mixing different baseline years in its analysis, and including fruit and vegetable emissions unrelated to replacing meat – which all have a big effect on the results. Commenting on this, Hayek said “It wasn’t just like comparing apples to oranges. It was like comparing really small apples to really big oranges.” The rest are inappropriate and biased modelling choices, such as ignoring the potential carbon sequestration from restoring nature on land spared by dietary change, and choosing to only model very unambitious levels of meat reduction in diets.

This leads to the question: Did the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) just make some extremely embarrassing errors? Or did it intentionally distort evidence under pressure from the livestock industry? Either way, the FAO has questions to answer. Unless rectified, these mistakes are a stain on the FAO’s reputation.

Our joint-letter to the FAO’s Director-General backs up Behrens and Hayek’s call for the damaging FAO report to be retracted. It has been supported by 78 organisations and 23 academics and experts from around the world, including Greenpeace, Changing Markets, Friends of the Earth US, ActionAid US, Seeding Sovereignty, investor Adasina Social Capital, Connecticut State Representative David Michel, and over 20 academics and experts.

We raise concern over a media report from 2023 where former FAO staff spoke out, saying they had been sidelined and censored by the FAO for highlighting the high emissions of livestock and more plant-based diets as an effective solution. This reportedly followed lobbying from high livestock-producing companies and countries in backlash to FAO publications like Livestock’s Long Shadow. As a result, we call for “a comprehensive investigation of how these serious errors and systemic biases were allowed”.

The FAO’s new report, by accident or design, seems to play into the hands of big livestock companies – whilst downplaying dietary change as a solution, it enthusiastically advocates for the intensification of livestock. The livestock industry were quick to leap on this – Merel van der Mark, Senior campaigner at Rainforest Action Network, reports that “It was shocking to hear JBS, the world’s largest meat packer, proclaim at an event during the COP in Dubai, that the report just released by the FAO showed that meat was ‘not the problem, but the solution to the climate crisis’”.

That’s why our joint-letter calls for the FAO to urgently retract and reissue its report only once the methodological errors it contains have been rectified, drawing on more appropriate and up-to-date studies and following engagement in serious dialogue with independent academics and experts from civil society. We also recommend that the release of the FAO’s 2050 Roadmap should be delayed until it has adopted “more robust, inclusive and transparent processes”.

There is a strong scientific consensus that one of the most effective ways to reduce emissions from the food system is a shift towards lower-meat, more plant-based diets. A recent survey of over two hundred climate scientists and food and agriculture experts, over half of whom have authored IPCC reports, found that global livestock emissions need to be reduced by 50% by 2030 and 61% by 2036, and that reducing human consumption of livestock products and reducing the number of livestock animals have the highest potential for reducing livestock emissions, whilst intensification of livestock was rated as the measure with lowest potential.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found, with “high confidence”, that a shift to more plant-based diets could mitigate GHG emissions by between 0.7 – 8 GtCO₂-eq per year, with higher reductions in meat and dairy leading to higher emission reductions. For instance, the IPCC cites a study which estimates that a flexitarian diet (75% of meat and dairy replaced by cereals and pulses, with only one portion of red meat a week) would reduce global emissions by approximately 5 GtCO₂-eq per year. That is over 9 times higher than the FAO’s estimate.

It is shocking that a United Nations institution like the FAO, which has so much global influence and is looked to as a reliable scientific authority, should distort evidence so flagrantly in favour of the livestock industry. The FAO must act now to restore its reputation and stop spreading misinformation.