Help protect... forests
We need forests. They store large amounts of carbon dioxide, release oxygen, regulate climate, prevent floods, protect soils and harbour millions of varieties of plant and animal species. They are also home to thousands of indigenous people whose livelihoods and ways of life are rapidly being destroyed.
How your diet can help
Forests are being destroyed not only to provide wood, paper and fuel but also to provide land for grazing cattle and for growing crops to feed to farmed animals. WRI assessments suggest that 20-30 percent of the world’s forest areas have already been converted to agriculture. As agricultural lands become more and more degraded, most of the land for replacement and expansion comes from the world’s forests. The expansion of agricultural land accounts for more than 60 per cent of worldwide deforestation.8
Most of this land is used to graze beef cattle. The UN FAO report Livestock's Long Shadow states that "By the year 2010 cattle are projected to be grazing on some 24 million hectares of neotropical land that was forest in 2000."9
This process has become known as the ‘hamburgerisation’ of the forests. Switching to a vegan diet can significantly reduce your contribution to the destruction of the world’s forests.4