New Report Finds a Link Between Climate Change and Farming

We have all been watching the upsetting fires in California and Colorado and wondering what we can do to help, other than of course eating a more plant-based diet which is proven to help the environment and slow the course of climate change, according to recent scientific research.

Climate change is in evidence the world over: This year, in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fires were reported at their second-highest levels in a decade, with more than 5,019-square miles of rainforest destroyed before July, as BBC News reported. A new report from Mighty Earth, a worldwide environmental nonprofit devoted to preserving and protecting forests and oceans in the wake of climate change, links the catastrophic fires to the our dietary habits.

Titled Fanning the Flames: The corporations destroying the Amazon and worsening the COVID-19 Pandemic, authors Alexis Russell and Lucia von Reusner set out to show the connection between devastating deforestation and industrial agriculture. “Fires have reached unprecedented levels across Brazil in 2020, irreparably destroying critical carbon-rich ecosystems and wreaking havoc on communities already vulnerable to COVID-19. The fires and their consequences are driven by a small handful of agricultural companies that supply meat to global markets, namely top meatpackers JBS, Marfrig, and Minerva,” they write, defending their statements with mapped analyses they did in collaboration with MapHubs displaying the association between the coronavirus, climate change, and big agricultural meat processing plants.

“The bulk of these fires is concentrated at the agricultural frontiers of Brazil, where Indigenous communities face the dual injustice of being underserved by critical public health infrastructure (and therefore limited in their capacity to manage risks imposed by COVID-19) while their land is being stolen and burned for industrial agriculture production,’ they continue, before examining further the link between the beef industry and both this public health and climate change crisis. You can read the full report here.