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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The “Selected Dairy” category in the Agriculture and Agri-food Canada [1] publication includes fluid milk, cheese, cream, and ice cream.

  2. The effectiveness of such information provision-based strategies has recently been questioned. For example, a recent literature review by the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN, 2015) has concluded that: “approaches aimed at getting individuals to change voluntarily have limited impacts.”

  3. Energy Technology Systems Analysis Program; see: www.iea-etsap.org.

  4. GERAD: Group for Research in Decision Analysis; HEC Montréal, Polytechnique Montréal, McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal.

  5. Data from a life cycle study with larger boundaries is expected to lead to increased energy and GHG emission coefficients as more processes are included when aggregating total energy usage and emissions (such as food processing and transport storage)

  6. Relative increases in non-meat products from the lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet have been taken from Table 1 in Pimentel and Pimentel [15] in order to calculate caloric substitution amounts.

  7. Pimentel and Pimentel [15] address US food consumption patterns which were deemed applicable to the Canadian context due to both countries’ socioeconomic resemblances.

  8. In the same manner as with Table 8, caloric substitution for the BPPED scenario has been derived from Table 1 in Pimentel and Pimentel [15].

  9. They are shown in a different figure because of the significantly higher order of magnitude of grains and oilseeds production.

  10. We acknowledge that future oil prices are very uncertain as observed with recent prices (from over $100 to below $30 in recent years). If oil prices stay constant or decrease in the long-term as oppose to the predicted rise (NEB, 2016), we would expect more oil consumption and less natural gas consumption in our reference scenarios, leading to higher GHG emissions in our results due to more oil-based agricultural processes being used.

  11. Most of the caloric substitution of pork and poultry comes from dairy products (see Table 8) which have significantly lower calories per kilogram consumed than meat products (see Table in Annex B). Therefore, the increase in dairy production must be larger than the decrease in poultry and pork production in order to compensate for the lower calorie count, and this leads to the slightly higher energy totals seen in Figure 7.

  12. See Table B2 in annex for a comparison of main health characteristics between Canada and the UK.

  13. Both members of the G7, these two countries have in particular similar Gini inequality coefficients (measure of income disparity in a country); see: www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/income-inequality.aspx. Additionally, groceries prices are comparable (less than a percentage point difference); see: www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=Canada&country2=United+Kingdom.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC individual and strategic grants) and from the Quebec Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation and Export Trade (MDEIE).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ESMIA, Montreal, Canada

    Erik Frenette & Kathleen Vaillancourt

  2. GERAD and Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, 3000 chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine, H3T 2A7, Montreal, Canada

    Olivier Bahn

Authors
  1. Erik Frenette
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  2. Olivier Bahn
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  3. Kathleen Vaillancourt
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Olivier Bahn.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 13

Table 13 Energy usage coefficients for Alberta
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Frenette, E., Bahn, O. & Vaillancourt, K. Meat, Dairy and Climate Change: Assessing the Long-Term Mitigation Potential of Alternative Agri-Food Consumption Patterns in Canada. Environ Model Assess 22, 1–16 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10666-016-9522-6

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