An Interview with Roni Neff, Research and Policy Director at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future – Q&A with Anna Lappé
September 2008
In 2006, Henning Steinfeld and colleagues at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a dense 390-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. If you managed to get past the mind-numbing figures, you would have absorbed the report’s startling conclusion: Livestock production, including land use changes for pasture and crop production, contributes more to the global warming effect than every single car, train, and plane on the planet. So move over Hummer; say hello to the hamburger.
What about the entire food system? Estimates range, but solid figures show that at least 31 percent of the global warming effect is currently coming from the food and agriculture and forestry sector.
Despite these reports from the United Nations and mounting evidence about the climate change toll of industrial agriculture, the media coverage of climate change seemed to be missing the story. And when most of us think about the climate-change bad guys, we still seemed to be tagging Shell and ExxonMobile, not Smithfield or Excel/Cargill. Partly it was what felt like this news black hole in the face of blaring evidence, and agricultural sustainability solutions staring us in the face, that prompted me to pen my next book about food and climate change.
But before now, my hunch about the lack of media coverage on food and climate change was just a feeling, I didn’t have the numbers to prove it. Now, thanks to the hard work of Dr. Roni Neff and her team at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, we now have the numbers to prove the media has missed the metaophorical boat.
I had a chance to talk with Roni on the release of her report that analyzes the coverage of climate change and helps us see how much need there is for the media (yes, you, bloggers and journalists and citizens, alike) to cover the story.
Her report arrives on the heels of a speech last week from Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In his talk at an event hosted by Compassion in World Farming, Pachauri made one of the boldest statements about the connection between our diet and global warming on a world stage: Choosing to eat less meat, Pachauri said, or cutting out meat entirely, is one of the most important personal choices we can make to address climate change:
“In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity,” said Pachauri. “Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.”
From your research, you concluded that the media has mostly missed the food and climate change story, especially in proportion to the food system’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Tell us about your study. What do you know? What did you find?
We wanted to find out to what extent the media has been covering the topic and what was being communicated. We decided to look at coverage in newspapers, starting in September 2005, just before An Inconvenient Truth, through January 2008. Of course, newspapers aren’t the only media source, but they’re both a source of record and have a broad readership and also, are in some ways representative of what’s getting out there to the public.
We first wanted to compare how much climate change coverage there was and how much of that was looking at food contributions.
We found 4,582 articles focused on climate change. Of that, 109–or only 2.4%–addressed food, specifically mentioning food, farm, or agriculture in their text.
Even a smaller percent, only a half a percent, mentioned meat.
Of the food and climate change articles, a large number of them were really only peripherally mentioning the topic. So only a half a percent of the total of the climate change articles really had what we coded as a substantial focus on the issue.
Did you notice any change in the type of the coverage on food and climate change over time?
We saw that there’s been a change in terms of who the news media is saying is responsible for taking action.We coded the food related articles, asking: If you were to infer from this aticle who was the party to take action, who would it be? In the beginning, it was overwhelmingly individuals. By the end, it was overwhelmingly government. So that really showed a shift in broadening the issue. This isn’t to say there is one right way to look at an issue, but that it shows a broadening of the depth of reporting on the issue.
That’s pretty dramatic. Not only was little mention of the food/agriculture connection to global warming, but when it was mentioned it was more often relegated to either opinion, letters to the editor or the opinion pages. Now, why does this matter? Why do you think it’s so important that we talk about food when we talk about climate change?
I think it’s really critical for a number of reasons.
First, it’s a really substantial portion of greenhouse gas emissions. If you combine the emissions from agriculture and forestry, of which a significant portion is deforestation for food production, you get to 31% of greenhouse gas emissions. To clarify these numbers, that’s looking at the early stages of food production. There are other estimates that look at food production beyond the point of agriculture and just try to sum all those emissions and you get in the range of perhaps 17 to 19 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, even in a country like the United States with such major sources.
So we’re talking about a huge contributor to our carbon footprint. That’s one major reason to talk about it. The other major reason is that there’s so much we can do to address it, and if we’re not aware of the problem we’re not going to be doing anything about it.
There’s evidence that just awareness isn’t enough to necessarily drive action and behavior change.
But if you don’t even know about it, there’s no chance that you’ll be changing your behavior in the right direction.
Finally, there are a lot of co-benefits to addressing food contributions to climate change.
I’m at a public health school, so we talk about the co-benefits for public health in terms of the fact that some of the recommendations are beneficial for nutrition and for climate change — such as eating less meat, eating lower on the food chain and focusing on less processed foods.
And in general, while in some ways the research is mixed, if we were to take action to deal with climate change in our food system we’d be creating a more sustainable food system which has numerous co-benefits.
Why do you think journalists missed the story?
This is just my opinion. We didn’t study that question.
I identified six possible reasons: The first one is the history. This issue was relatively late to be recognized as a key contributor to climate change. So when climate change expertise was being developed in the groups putting out the stories to newspapers, a lot of the experts were focused in other areas so that was the message news media was getting.
The second reason is what I call carbon dioxide bias. There are a number of different greenhouse gases of concern and carbon dioxide is the one that’s most known. But within the food system, methane and nitrous oxide are really important. So when people started talking about methane and nitrous oxide, the news media might have tuned them out, not realizing the importance, and that they’re much more powerful greenhouse gases. [Methane has 25 times the global warming effect of carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide has 298 times the effect and lasts in the atmosphere for over 100 years.]
Number three the information may have been harder for reporters to grasp than some of the more simple connections.
A lot of the emissions in the food system are indirect emissions, which means essentially they become embodied in the food through all the varied and different processes that it takes to produce the food. It’s harder to get a clear estimate to quantify them.
We in the United States don’t have a lot of clear estimates to help us quantify the greenhouse gases from different foods, so it’s just a harder message for reporters to grasp.
Number four, a lot of the environmental advocacy groups hadn’t developed the expertise and food and agriculture are not the industries that they’ve focused their targeting on.
I think it’s also an issue about not wanting to alienate or confuse people. It’s one thing to tell people to change their light bulb, it’s another thing to say, ‘change your diet’. I think that’s changing dramatically more recently, with environmental advocacy groups increasingly incorporating food issues into their messages, so that’s a positive sign.
A fifth issue is that food issues are often framed as an individual rather than a social issue. If an issue is relevant only for individuals, you might report on it in the society pages, but it’s not going to be treated as something with newsworthiness or policy implications.
Six: It’s an open question about what is the impact of supermarket advertising in newspapers. Supermarket advertising is ubiquitous in newspapers and there have been studies that show that the advertising sources in newspapers are to some extent associated with coverage. In general, we have not targeted the food industry as someone to question. They’ve generally been seen as one of the good guys.
When you also have somebody from the food industry that is one of your top advertisers, to what extent is that going to affect your coverage? This may be a subtle or subconscious impact. I’m not saying that reporters consciously think about this.
What change do you hope to see as a result of publishing this study?
Well, first of all, I hope it increases coverage and awareness about this key gap and helps increase coverage of it. The more awareness there is about the fact that they haven’t been covering it, and the awareness of the issue in general, the more there might be changes on the individual, corporate, and government level. Further, the more we know about what messages people are getting, the more effectively we can develop our own communications.
Did you see any trends in coverage?
The study does show a definite increase over time, but basically starting in September 2005, there was only one article in all of these 16 newspapers. By the end of the study in January 2008, there were six. It got up to 10 in one month in the middle. Put another way, the number of mentions of the food contributions went from 0.8% of climate change articles in the first six months to 2.9% in the last six months. So there was an increase across time, but it never really still got that high.
However there was a very significant rise in the depth of coverage. For the entire first 14 months of the study, there was only 1 article that was coded as substantially about food and climate change. In the last fourteen months, there were 19.
This was very surprising to me, because being involved in this field, I see all these postings on blogs and news alerts, it makes me realize I must see the sum totality of what’s going on out there!
Have you changed what you eat because of what you’ve learned?
I have. I haven’t gone totally vegetarian, although I waiver in and out of it. I don’t think that’s it necessary to go for extreme delineations. So I eat a lot less meat, and I don’t eat red meat, I just eat chicken or turkey, sustainably produced.
In the U.S., agriculture is a much smaller portion of our greenhouse gas emissions so doesn’t it make sense that news media here focus elsewhere?
Regardless of where that number ultimately comes out–and I don’t think that that number has been well-documented within this country–it’s still going to be substantial and it’s still going to be an area where we can make a difference. Given the imperative and the urgency of cutting back our greenhouse gases so dramatically, this is one area that we haven’t even begun to tap the potential of.
What are some of the solutions?
It’s important to recognize solutions at three levels. At the individual level, it seems pretty clear that the number one thing that can be done is to eat less meat and dairy. The chair of the IPCC just a few weeks ago stated to give up meat for one day per week initially, and to decrease it from there, ‘in terms of immediacy of action, is the most attractive opportunity.’ We at Johns Hopkins are associated with a campaign called the Meatless Monday campaign, and cutting back on meat just one day a week is one way to do it.
One more thing about meat: There is evidence that we in the U.S. are currently consuming 8.8 ounces of meat per person per day. The USDA recommends we cut that by one-third. According to a recent study in the science journal, The Lancet, in order to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at the 2005 level, we would need to cut down our U.S. meat consumption to 3.2 ounces—and that’s just to stabilize the greenhouse gases at current levels, given expected increases in developing countries.
So we really need to cut back on meat consumption, but it doesn’t have to mean going vegetarian or vegan.
Among our other food choices, we can also choose more seasonal food, eat lower on the food chain, choose foods with less processing, and look for Energy Star refrigerators. While the evidence is mixed on things like local and organic, given the co-benefits with other environmental concerns, it seems like a good direction. We can also avoid things like air-freighted food, and seek less packaging and reduce our own food waste.
We know that it’s very difficult to change our diet, and the food environment is not always supportive, but those are the directions we need to be going. And we need to help clarify for people about what they should be buying.
From a business side, there is a need for taking all those things that I just mentioned from the individual side and for the food industry to support those changes. There is also a lot of opportunity in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the food industry in terms of how they produce and process food.
Any one specific company you’d want to give a shout out to?
Just one example: We’ve been very impressed with Bon Appétit, which is an institutional caterer that serves a lot of colleges and universities, among others. They have a major initiative allowing people to calculate their own emissions, reducing red meat use by 25 percent, and seasonal and local sourcing, among other features.
On the government level, there are a large number of detailed changes that could happen, but number one would be to promote production, access, and affordability of more sustainable food from a greenhouse gas perspective.
We don’t know everything about what’s sustainable, but we know a lot, so how do we get that food to be more dominant in our food system and to avoid subsidizing food that’s so environmentally destructive?
Number two, we can avoid food from deforested land.
Number three, we need a lot more funds for research on all these things and funds for labeling and standards initiatives.
Government should also be supporting communications campaigns
Finally, there is a real need for our food and agriculture policy to be better integrated into our climate change policy.
I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s high time that all of us see the Farm Bill and food policy as climate change policy, too.
Neff’s report reminds us how critical this topic is. Here’s to hoping that if she were to do the same analysis a few years from now, we’d see some different stats. Interested in finding out more? Here are some of the resources we mentioned in our conversation:
• Take a Bite Out of Climate Change’s blog
• Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Many resources and links to information and publications focused on interconnections between diet, food production, environment and public health.
• Here’s a link to Neff’s article about her study.
September 2008
