 I should thank IIEA and RDS for giving me the opportunity to speak to you all today and thank all of you, of course, for coming over your lunch breaks to hear what I have to say. I want to start with some context, actually, about why we're having this conversation in the first place. That, of course, is that, globally, we are on course for something like four degrees of warming above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of this century. I'm not going to go into the gory details of what that implies for human societies and economies. Suffice to say that it's quite a terrifying prospect. I've just had a daughter. There's a very good chance that she will still be alive at the end of this century, and she will be one of the oldest and most vulnerable members of society. And I do worry about what four degrees of warming means for her. We also have to realise that, despite the best intentions, Paris, the talks at Paris at the end of this year are not going to avert dangerous climate change. The pledges which are on the table, which currently cover about 70% of emissions already, put us on course for something like three degrees of warming. And this seems to be, from the conversations I have, the general expectation of what Paris is going to deliver. And, of course, there's a question mark about whether or not governments are actually going to deliver the pledges they put forwards. And this, again, is well above the two degree guardrail. It's well into the territory of tipping points, runaway climate change and all that goes with that. So what we know is that a lot more must be done if the international community is actually going to deliver on its stated objective of limiting global warming to two degrees centigrade. Now, of course, there are lots of opportunities to do this. A lot more can be done in existing sectors with technologies and more ambitious policies and so on. What I want to do today is talk to you about one opportunity and I argue that it's an opportunity that deserves far greater policy priority than it currently receives, which I think is almost zero. And that is reducing consumption of meat and dairy products at a global level. Why will production of meat and dairy on a life-cycle basis generate just over 7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year? Now, there's a lot of science out there which goes into the breakdown of where all of this comes from. Suffice to say, a lot of this is from enteric fermentation in rumen and livestock, methane. The livestock sector is probably the largest source of methane globally. Also very significant amounts of nitrous oxide from manure and fertiliser use to produce crops. Carbon dioxide from land use change, deforestation and soil carbon losses. Within the livestock sector, of course, beef is the most emission intensive due to enteric fermentation and poor conversion efficiency. Producing beef is not a particularly efficient way to get calories or protein. Dairy, much lower emissions intensity, about a quarter of the emissions intensity of beef may be less. But there are comparable volumes of emissions globally from the dairy industry simply due to the volumes of dairy that are produced and consumed. Between the beef and dairy amount for something like two thirds of the total emissions in the livestock sector, chicken and pork are much lower intensity products. But this is where much of the recent growth has been globally and it's also where the growth is expected to come from in the future. Growth in consumption is really important here. By 2050, consumption of meat and dairy are expected to have risen 76% and 65% respectively on 2005 to 2007 baselines. And this is a key point that on this trend of increasing consumption, supply side mitigation, technical mitigation on farm and in the value chain cannot contain emissions growth. If we do everything we can, everywhere we can, emissions are still going to rise. So if we move all of livestock production onto the most carbon efficient models available within a particular agroecological zone, you can reduce emissions intensity of the livestock sector globally by something like 32% and demand growth is outstripping that. And this causes a problem of course because inexorably rising emissions in the livestock sector cannot be reconciled with a shrinking carbon budget in the long run. And a number of studies, recent studies, academic studies have looked at this question specifically an extrapolated agriculture and land use emissions in the context of a two degree budget and found that the two collide somewhere in the second half of the century. The conclusion of these studies is that even with sustainable intensification of agriculture, dietary change is necessary if we are to keep global warming below two degrees centigrade. Now this isn't a question of either or. I'm not saying we only need to look at reducing consumption. I'm saying we have to do both. We have to do what we can on the supply side. We have to do what we can on the demand side. Given this, which I think is a fairly compelling case for action, what is being done, I would argue nothing like enough. As many of you will know agriculture is not covered in UNFCCC negotiations. Efforts to establish an agriculture work stream there have failed. Agriculture is marginal in international climate finance accounting for a few percent of the financial flows in public and market based mechanisms. We've got the new global alliance for climate smart agriculture, and of course that is to be welcomed. It remains to be seen, I think, what exactly that is going to deliver in terms of livestock sector emissions. Looking at the national level, 40 annex one countries to the UNFCCC, only Bulgaria and France include quantitative emissions reduction targets for their livestock sectors. Similar picture among developing countries of the NAMA mitigation plans that have been submitted to the UNFCCC, eight of 55 mentioned livestock, and only one Brazil has a quantitative emissions reduction target. Where they exist, policy measures are typically weaker than they are for other sectors of the economy. They are often voluntary, private sector led. The livestock sector is typically not included in emission trading schemes or carbon pricing schemes. So compared to efforts in other sectors, transport, power, industry, housing, forestry and so on, I would argue that the livestock sector is pretty much forgotten by policymakers. But all of this actually amounts to far more than is happening on the demand side, and there there really is nothing. And this is frustrating because this is actually where the real mitigation opportunity lies. A study that was published last year in Nature Climate Change looked at the mitigation opportunity from global adoption of nutritional guidelines. If everybody eats the amount of meat that is recommended by the World Health Organization, what would be the impact on global emissions? The estimate was about 5.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050, which compares very favourably to 4 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent from sustainable intensification of the entire agriculture sector, not just livestock. It's also attractive from an economic perspective. Another study looked at the impacts of global adoption of nutritional guidelines on mitigation costs, and they found that globally again by 2050, if people adopted healthy diets, then the reduction in emissions in the agriculture sector would create sufficient space in the two-degree carbon budget for other sectors to cut their emissions more slowly. With a cumulative impact on mitigation costs in the energy sector of a reduction of something in the region of 50% by 2050. That is a huge number. You think about what that could do to the political economy of decarbonising the energy sector. There are further co-benefits from reduction in meat and dairy consumption. Health is an obvious one. Of course meat and dairy form part of a healthy diet, but globally we already eat more meat than is good for us. Globally per capita basis about 25% more meat than is recommended, and of course this masks a huge skew between developed and developing countries. The US consumes over three times more meat than is recommended on a per capita basis Europe just under two and a half times. Of course diets to the high in animal products are associated with a higher burden of non-communicable diseases. The cause and effect relationship between these two factors is not yet fully understood, but there is a higher incidence of certain forms of cancer, colon cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes associated with diets to the high in livestock products. So there could be very significant public health benefits from a shift to diets that are lower in meat and dairy. Food security about a quarter of all crops grown globally affect animals. This represents half of all the protein that is produced in about a third of all the calories that are produced. When we're looking at feeding 9 billion people by 2050, possibly 11 billion people by the end of the century, is this really a good use of scarce agricultural resources? The rough rule of protein and calorie production from vegetables are three to 20 times more efficient than they are from the livestock sector. So it would surely be better to be producing animal products using crop residues rather than crops and pasture land not suitable for crop production. And if this was the case, that would probably cover about 30% by mass of meat production globally. So there's about 70% of global meat production that you can argue is inefficient on that basis. Land use about three quarters of all agricultural land is used either directly or indirectly to raise animals. What is the opportunity cost of this land use in the context of increasing demand for land, particularly in the context of increasing demand for carbon sequestration? Anybody that looks at the most ambitious scenarios of the IPCC will see a lot of bioenergy with carbon capture storage in there. Now we can have a debate about how realistic that technology is, but certainly it seems that the modelers are assuming that there needs to be a significant amount of land use put aside for carbon sequestration. Between 1990 and 2008, about a quarter of all global deforestation was for pasture land. That's just under eight islands deforested for pasture land over the period. About 10 islands were cleared for crops, about a quarter of which of course are fed to animals. This has implications for biodiversity. Globally there are about 22 billion chickens now. That's three per head of the global human population. I estimate that cows are probably the most biomassive species now walking the earth in terms of sheer wet body weight. Unfortunately for other species, things look less good. A paper in science last year found that we're probably on the cusp of the sixth great extinction. The background extinction rate over history is about 0.1 extinctions per million species. We're probably now somewhere between 100 and 1000. Habitat loss is the single biggest driver of species loss and agriculture is the single biggest driver of habitat destruction and 75% of all agricultural land is used for livestock production. So I think there's a strong policy argument for addressing consumption of meat and dairy. And then the question becomes why are governments not doing so? And there are a number of reasons that we've identified. First of all, there's a fear of intrusion into lifestyle choices and being accused of nanny statism, particularly in the context of general public ambivalence about climate change. Second, of course, is the cultural significance of meat in many countries, particularly this is something that we found in our research in America and Brazil. Meat has huge cultural significance and it's a very difficult conversation to have to ask people to give up meat or at least reduce their consumption of meat. And in developing countries, meat and dairy products have aspirational status they're associated with moving into the middle class. There's also expectations in government of significant private sector resistance. This is common to all aspects of climate change policy, but governments generally are reluctant to engage in policies which they anticipate will result in significant private sector mobilisation in opposition. And there's uncertainty regarding the efficacy of different interventions. How would government through policy measures go about reducing consumption of meat and dairy? What is the evidence for what works and what doesn't? The evidence base is extremely thin on this topic and that makes it very difficult for policy makers to pursue in this difficult political environment. And this leads to a circle of inertia. There's an absence of action from governments. This leads to low levels of awareness or concern among publics and that of course generates an absence of action. So to look at this question more closely, we commissioned Ipsos Moray to do a survey of consumers in 12 different countries, middle income countries, developed countries to understand their attitudes and understanding around the role of the livestock sector and climate change. And what we found was an awareness gap. So people in all the countries we surveyed had high awareness of climate change, anthropogenic climate change, but there was always a low awareness of the livestock sector's role in producing emissions compared to other sectors of the economy which produce emissions in a ballpark range. Typically, from the focus groups that we've run, there's a vague awareness of the role of the livestock sector. Generally, the things that people talk about are jokes about burping or farting cows that they've read in media pieces, but they don't really take seriously. It's a bit of a humorous subject. And they're far more likely to identify transport, power, industry or deforestation as drivers of emissions. And this is a problem because what we also found was that the willingness of people to act is linked to their awareness of a sector's contribution to climate change. So sectors where people had a greater awareness of the role in climate change were the ones where they identified that they would be willing to change their behaviours, maybe to ride a bike instead of driving a car if it was transport for example. And this is also true within sectors. So if you look at a particular sector, those people that had a greater understanding of the role of that sector in contributing to climate change were the same people that were more likely to say, I'd be willing to change my behaviour. And awareness of course is a precondition for voluntary action. If people are going to change their behaviours they have to be aware of the problem they're trying to address. But alone it is not going to be enough. Actually only a small minority of people will consciously change their behaviours based on new information. And this is something that we've seen come through quite clearly I think in the focus group research that we have done. Actually choices, consumption choices, purchasing choices are primarily automatic and they're shaped by environmental cues in the purchasing environment. And of course this is something that's exploited very effectively by the retail sector. I don't know how many times you've walked into a supermarket and bought something that you had no intention of buying when you walked in. But for me it happens almost every time. If you're queuing up at the checkouts it won't escape your notice that these are very often lined with sweet treats. And of course the idea is that as you're standing there waiting to buy your food you buy yourself a chocolate bar. Very often those sweet treats are positioned at the eye level of a small child so that the child will nag the parent. So these are the kinds of environmental cues which lead to automatic choices. And even when people are making rational consumption decisions based on an understanding of the consequences environmental concerns tend to be subordinate to more immediate concerns of health, food safety and so on. So it would be naive to suppose that people are going to change their behaviours and eat less meat and dairy products simply by increasing awareness about the problem. But I would argue that raising awareness is still very important for three reasons. First of all it creates the political space for action. If governments don't see a public that is aware of the issue or understand it then they are less likely to decide to move. Secondly it creates an opportunity for responsible business practices. Again if consumers are aware of this issue there is an opportunity for businesses to position themselves as responsible actors and stakeholders in this space. Thirdly it prepares publics and consumers for government intervention. So if governments actually are going to move forwards to shape dietary preferences, disincentivise certain consumption decisions it will be a lot easier for them to do so in a context where consumers understand the policy rationale and justification for doing that. And again this is something that we've seen in the focus groups in the different countries that whilst I would be lying if I told you people would welcome interventions to make beef or dairy more expensive they wouldn't, that's clear. They could also understand the rationale for doing so and whilst they may be disgruntled in the short term they would expect to come to accept it as part of climate change and public health policies they have done in many other aspects of life. So returning to the challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change that I opened with dietary change is part of the solution. It is not on its own sufficient but it is necessary. It also offers important co-benefits, health, reduced habitat destruction and species loss, enhanced efficiency of food production and many other aspects. The received wisdom that dietary change is simply too hard for governments to pursue is untested and I would ask the question is the challenge of reducing meat and dairy consumption in comparably greater than that of transforming power, transport and industrial systems which is of course where the lion's share of mitigation policy is focused. Or for that matter the practices of millions of farmers around the world. Let's not forget how difficult it can be to change on farm practices in very large developing countries where extension services and government capacity are very low. I would actually argue that shifting consumer behaviours against these other challenges is no harder and the efforts need to begin now. Thank you very much.