End Times

There’s No Free Lunch With Climate Change

A new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change underscores the hard choices we face on land use and global warming

Credit: cinoby/Getty Images

Viewed from space, the African island nation of Madagascar appears to bleed. What you’re seeing isn’t blood, though, but the result of massive deforestation — more than 90% of the country’s forests have been destroyed over the past century. Without trees to anchor the land, the red-tinged soil flows into the rivers and oceans during the rainy season. It’s a rare opportunity to see — in a single image — what humanity is doing to the planet on a global scale.

The view from the ground is even worse, though. When I visited Madagascar for a reporting trip in 2008, I witnessed vast stretches of barren, eroded scrubland, punctuated by a handful of remaining forests that have been kept intact as wildlife preserves. And there was so much life to preserve. Kept in island isolation after Madagascar separated from India 80 to 100 million years ago, countless new species arose that can only be found there: leaf-tailed geckos, Parson’s chameleons, and of course, the lemurs, the band of small primates native to the island. Lemurs are considered the most endangered group of vertebrates on Earth, and what little habitat that has been left to them is shrinking by the day.

I was thinking about Madagascar as I read the newest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which addresses climate change and land use. The statistics are sobering. Human use directly impacts more than 70% of global, ice-free land surface. As human population and food consumption increases, we slash forests and use up water in an effort to meet our needs, and increasingly, our wants. The IPCC estimates that nearly a quarter of all human greenhouse gas emissions are due to agriculture, forestry, and other land use. Not energy or pollution, but what we’re doing to the planet that is literally beneath our feet, as we use up land and water resources at what the UN calls an “unprecedented rate.”

The problem is that there’s not much evidence that human beings want to eat less meat, at least…