How to Save the Planet with Food
A data-driven roadmap to global ecological restoration
I’ve spent the last two decades trying to preserve and restore landscapes at an increasingly large scale in coastal Ecuador. For many years, I mistakenly believed the biggest limiting factor was money. A botched conversation with one of the wealthiest men in the world made me realize I was wrong about that. The real answer is opportunity cost, which is primarily driven by one thing.
This realization was the first step toward fundamentally rewiring my understanding of the global ecological predicament and the quickest path to solving it. What emerged from this process are 18 signposts that map out a realistic roadmap for restoring the health and viability of our biosphere within three decades. Politics aren’t necessary, and you can still eat meat.
All of the numbers below are supported by empirical studies and integrated assessment modeling.
Lesson #1: The top of the pyramid
Humanity’s use of planetary resources is on pace to exceed the planetary supply within our lifetime. If that point is reached, the world will become an increasingly violent and unstable place to live. Although this trend applies to various classes of resources, the furthest one upstream is land use. If we solve the land-use problem, it will trigger a self-reinforcing cycle of natural ecosystem restoration that ripples across the face of the entire planet and its atmosphere in a matter of decades. This is the quickest and most realistic route to achieving global resource abundance during our lifetime.
Lesson #2: The market can solve what the environmental movement can’t
The fundamental defect of the environmental movement is that it primarily treats the symptoms rather than the root cause. It’s like the little child trying to build a sandcastle at the edge of the ocean when the tide is coming in. Sure, there may be a few small wins here and there, but ecological conservation and restoration will always be a losing battle as long as human demand for land exceeds the supply. It all comes down to a question of opportunity cost. Humanity will always choose food over relatively abstract concepts like conservation or climate change.
Lesson #3: “It’s food, stupid!”
Yes, the overuse of fossil fuels is a major threat to the biosphere, but food is the bigger problem. Human food production generates 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, occupies nearly half of all habitable land on the planet, accounts for 70% of all freshwater withdrawals, and drives 90% of tropical deforestation. It is the single biggest driver of ecological collapse and biological extinction throughout the world.
Lesson #4: What to fix
The solution is not for everyone to stop eating. The issue isn’t necessarily the quantity of calories that humanity consumes. It’s the inefficient way that those calories are produced. The answer is to find a way to feed humanity using significantly less land and water. This single adjustment has the capacity to simultaneously:
- halt worldwide deforestation
- free up an entire continent worth of land for reforestation and natural regeneration
- offset the CO2 emissions of every single train, plane, automobile, and ship in the world
- lower near-surface air temperatures by up to 2° Celsius across much of the planet.
And those are just the headline outcomes.
Lesson #5: Vegans and politicians not (necessarily) required
Before we get into the numbers, a few reassurances are in order. The solution proposed below doesn’t require anyone to make voluntary dietary sacrifices. It certainly doesn’t require everyone to become a vegan. Nor does it require any new legislation — with the exception of eliminating or else repurposing subsidies.
Most of the fix proposed below can be driven by the laws of supply and demand. This is how we can use economics as a tool rather than an obstacle, bypass the politicians, and avoid the culture wars — all of which are key choke points.
Lesson #6: The single biggest resource suck
In terms of resource inefficiency, the elephant in the room is actually a cow. Roughly half of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for only 2% of the global calorie supply and less than 5% of the global protein supply. About a quarter of all habitable land on our planet is devoted to feeding cows.
Compared to all other animals, cattle require more land, food, and time to get from birth to your plate. This is compounded by the fundamental inefficiency of “ruminants” (cows, sheep, and goats) as food-producing vehicles.
On the positive side, ruminants have the ability to convert fibrous plant materials that humans can’t digest into animal proteins that humans can digest. On the negative side, they convert feed/forage into human food at rates that are dramatically less efficient than “monogastric” animals like pigs and chickens.
For every 100 kilocalories that a cow consumes, humans only get 3 kilocalories of beef. Sheep meat (i.e., lamb and mutton) is similarly inefficient but only represents 4.8% of global meat consumption.
Globally replacing beef and sheep meat with plant-based alternatives — even while maintaining consumption levels of all other animal-based food — would allow 1.9 billion hectares to be reclaimed by forests, grasslands, and wetlands. That is an area of land the size of the entire United States and China combined. Replacing beef alone would achieve the vast majority of those gains.
Lesson #7: Other animals are more efficient than cows
Almost all other animal-based food sources are significantly more resource-efficient than ruminant meat. You can get the same amount of protein from eggs, chicken, or farmed fish using less than 7% of the land required to produce beef. For pork, it’s about 11%.
The same applies to climate impact. Per unit of protein, beef generates about 8 times as much greenhouse gas emissions as chicken and farmed fish and over 60 times as much as beans, peas, and nuts.
Dairy is marginally less efficient than many other forms of animal-based foods — in terms of both land use and greenhouse gas emissions — but it’s far more efficient than beef. Resource metrics aside, dairy also often plays a necessary role in nutrition, livelihoods, and food security in places where plant-based substitutes aren’t yet practical or affordable. As such, humanity is not in a position to abandon dairy.
Beef, however, is a different story.
Lesson #8: Plants are more efficient than animals
Per calorie produced, most plant-based foods require less than 3% of the land that beef requires. Even when accounting for protein quality by using measures like the Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS), plant-based protein requires only 8% of the land needed for beef. It also generates 10 to 30 times less greenhouse gas emissions, depending on the degree to which the plant-based protein is processed.
Here is one way to visualize this. Out of every 100 hectares that are currently used to produce beef, imagine liberating 80–90 hectares for other uses. Now extrapolate this across most of the planet.
Lesson #9: Globally, the numbers get really big
In total, 3.8 billion hectares of land are used to feed livestock, which represents 80% of all agricultural land. This covers 36% of all habitable land on Earth. As a point of comparison, all urban and built-up land covers about 0.4 billion hectares — which is a mere 4% of all habitable land.
This means that more than one out of every three hectares of land capable of supporting vegetation — across the entire planet — is used to feed livestock.
Of the 3.8 billion hectares of total livestock land, 3.2 billion hectares is grazing land, which is almost entirely used for ruminants — the vast majority of which are cattle. An additional 0.6 billion hectares of land are used to grow crops to feed livestock.
Plants that directly feed humans cover 0.8 billion hectares. This is only 16% of all agricultural land but produces 83% of the global calorie supply and 62% of the global protein supply.
Lastly, about 0.2 billion hectares are used to grow non-food crops like cotton and biofuels, which represent 4% of all agricultural land.
At 3.8 billion hectares, total livestock area is by far the biggest slice of the land resource pie. Most of it (about 2.7 billion hectares) is used to feed ruminants — primarily cattle. That covers more area than the entire continent of North America including Greenland.
As paradoxical as it may sound, allowing most of this land to revert to forest and natural ecosystems, while using just a small fraction for crops or other forms of livestock, would actually lead to an increase in global food production.
This is how humanity can reforest and naturally restore more than a billion hectares of land while still being able to feed a growing population. In the process, this would also draw down about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades.
That is the plan.
Lesson #10: The lowest-hanging fruit
There are several ways to significantly increase the efficiency of food systems in the near and medium term, and we should pursue all of them. The World Resources Institute devised a comprehensive framework called Produce, Protect, Reduce, and Restore, which is the right approach. But executing all of the proposed actions is a tall order. Dividing our attention across too many different problems is also one of the five reasons why the environmental movement is failing. Strategies laden with nuance and complexity tend to sputter before takeoff — sad but true.
The solution with the lowest barrier to entry and the biggest ecological payoff is to replace ruminant meat (especially beef) with any other alternative as much as possible. Plant-based food would be the ideal substitute, but other animal-based foods will also work. Prioritizing this in the tropics will speed up results and magnify the impact.
That is the single most important objective for both the global food industry and the global environmental movement over the next two decades.
Replacing beef, sheep meat, and dairy would further magnify this impact, but this would be harder to achieve. Thus, the primary focus should be on beef and, to a lesser extent, sheep meat.
A secondary approach, which is also backed by extensive research, is to replace 50% of animal-based food with plant-based food. In this case, the policy recommendation is to specifically focus on replacing the least efficient animal-based foods — namely, ruminants. This is another way of saying, once again: replace ruminant meat (especially beef) with any other alternative as much as possible.
Replacing all animal-based foods with plant-based foods is not a realistic goal right now — both in terms of consumer preferences and worldwide nutrition needs. It’s also not necessary. From a land, water, and greenhouse gas perspective, animal-based foods like poultry, eggs, farmed fish, and even pork aren’t the primary problem.
Beef is the single biggest planetary resource suck. Fixing it is a massive opportunity for the farming, food, and biotech sectors.
Lesson #11: Food security is part of the equation
There are, of course, nuances. Some land that is currently used as grazing land for cattle and other ruminants (like goats and sheep) may not be suitable for any other type of food production and may serve a vital role in local food security. For areas that were historically grasslands, ruminant grazing might still be an appropriate use of land.
But the vast majority of the rest of the world’s grazing land is a net resource drain. Some of that land can be converted to higher-efficiency food production. Most of it, however, can be transitioned back to native vegetation without compromising food security.
This strategy is most effective on land that was historically forested— especially in the tropics, where the forest regenerates the fastest.
On the demand side, research from the World Resources Institute found that most of the problem could be solved if only 20% of the global population (which currently eats the most beef and lamb) reduced their consumption of those two kinds of meat. This same demographic, which is primarily located outside of the tropics, generally has abundant access to other protein sources and is well-positioned to make this change without suffering nutritional consequences.
The question then becomes: how to trigger this dietary change? The short answer is: not with moral arguments.
Lesson #12: Win by economics, not by ethics
Only a minority of consumers are willing and able to make dietary sacrifices for ethical reasons. For everyone else, the key to success is to drive down prices for plant-based alternatives and improve their taste and nutritional profile.
Perhaps the easiest challenge to overcome is the price differential. One of the main reasons that animal-based food is often cheaper than plant-based food is because of the price-distorting effects of subsidies and tax breaks, which are significantly skewed in favor of livestock and the commodities that are fed to livestock. According to a market analysis conducted by researchers at Stanford University:
- In the U.S., about 800 times more public funding and 190 times more lobbying money goes to animal-based food products than plant-based alternatives.
- The playing field in the EU is even more skewed, where about 1,200 times more public funding goes to animal-source food products.
- EU cattle producers were highly dependent on direct subsidy payments, which constituted at least 50% of their income during the study period.
Repurposing subsidies and tax breaks from livestock toward plant-based food is the quickest and most obvious fix to this problem. At the very least, the playing field should be leveled.
Lesson #13: How to Beat Meat
When I say “plant-based foods,” I’m referring to two different categories: 1) whole plant foods that people directly eat and 2) manufactured plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy. From a health and nutrition perspective, the former is preferable. But the latter will also play an important role in filling in the gaps. Both are far superior to beef in terms of resource use.
The two most famous manufactured plant-based protein alternatives are Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat. They both use roughly 20 times less land and water than beef and generate nearly 10 times less greenhouse gas emissions per burger.
The goal, now, is to outcompete beef in terms of price, taste, and nutrition. In general, plant-based substitutes are still one or two steps away from achieving this feat. Some of this work involves scaling up emerging technologies like precision fermentation and cellular agriculture and finding ways to make them healthier. But much of it is simply using existing plant-based foods in innovative and tasty ways and investing in popularizing them. In categories like milk, many people already prefer plant-based alternatives.
We can move the needle on the demand side by targeting consumer awareness in nations where beef consumption is high. But the supply side of the market economy will ultimately drive this transition.
Once plant-based food becomes cheaper than ruminant-based food, and the flavor and nutrition are at least comparable, consumer preferences will gradually shift in their favor across most demographics. Ruminant-based foods will continue to be enjoyed as a delicacy, but they will eventually be priced out of everyday consumption. That will mark a phase shift in global resource use.
Lesson #14: Land without demand goes wild
Farmers and agribusinesses will follow the dictates of the laws of supply and demand. Some of the land currently used for ruminants will be repurposed for cultivating plant-based and tree-based alternatives and/or more efficient forms of livestock. But a massive chunk of all agricultural land will no longer be needed to feed people. Over the course of a few decades, as much as a billion hectares of abandoned farmland will naturally revert to forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Deforestation — which is primarily a function of land scarcity driven by agricultural expansion — will likewise effectively come to a halt.
Something analogous to this happened in Europe after the Bubonic Plague killed 30–60% of the population in the 1300s. It happened again in the Americas after European diseases killed 80–90% of the Indigenous population in the 1500s.
Mass death isn’t needed or desired for such a transition this century — we can do it by a partial shift from ruminant meat to mostly plant-based alternatives. But it is the same natural process that will inevitably play out on the land. The scientific term is ecological succession, which is nature’s built-in mechanism for recovery. When humans walk away, landscapes gradually return to a wild state.
Lesson #15: Mother Nature plants trees better than people do
Ecological succession is the most efficient way to restore land at scale. It’s also the primary tool my team uses to reforest large tracts of cattle pasture in Ecuador. In severely degraded areas, we often accelerate the process with high-leverage reforestation techniques like assisted natural regeneration, enrichment planting, and applied nucleation. But in many cases, all humans have to do to restore land is step back and let Mother Nature do the heavy lifting.
This is why labor-intensive tree-planting programs are often a waste of time, effort, and money. When you harness the power of ecological succession, the cost of large-scale forest restoration is minimal. In our experience in Ecuador, semi-passive reforestation methods like assisted natural regeneration are about 5–15% of the cost of plantation-style reforestation, and pure natural regeneration is 0–5% of the cost. This aligns with global findings from 138 low- and middle-income countries, where natural regeneration generally costs less than 4% of plantation-style reforestation but typically delivers greater carbon storage, biodiversity benefits, and ecosystem services.
Although natural regeneration in heavily degraded areas will not be as quick or easy, humans aided by technology and/or animals can coax the process along through targeted actions. This also applies to the restoration of grasslands and peatlands.
Lesson #16: Tropical forest restoration has the highest ROI
About one-third of global pasture area was once forested. This roughly equates to 1 billion hectares. This land is the highest priority for beef replacement. It can be done through natural forest regeneration or conversion to multifunctional forests like agroforestry or mixed plantations.
Among all forests, tropical forests generate the highest returns in carbon storage, water cycling, and biodiversity. On average, tropical forests accumulate carbon twice as fast as temperate and boreal forests, and they harbor most of the planet’s biodiversity. Land and labor costs are also generally cheaper in the tropics.
Forest regrowth of all types — but especially in the tropics — is currently the most scalable technology that we have to remove carbon from the atmosphere. A lesser-known feature of forests, but arguably just as important for the coming century, is their ability to moderate local and regional air temperatures; they lower the highs during summer and soften the lows during winter.
For all of the above reasons, tropical forest restoration is the quickest and most cost-effective route to achieving significant ecological gains both locally and globally.
That said, ecosystem restoration in temperate forests and other biomes like grasslands and especially peatlands is also an important part of the equation. The transition of abandoned farmland to natural habitat will necessarily play out across the globe. This will represent a phase shift in planetary land management.
Lesson #17: Softening the transition
Regardless of what happens in the food industry, the global job market and social landscape will inevitably undergo massive change in the coming decades as a result of A.I. and other technological developments. The social and economic impact of the ruminants-to-rewilding transition will pale in comparison.
Nevertheless, social friction can be minimized by incorporating farming communities into this process. Old jobs and livelihoods in ruminant-based food production will mostly be replaced by new livelihoods in ecosystem restoration and Food Production 2.0.
Meanwhile, demographic shifts and intra-national migration patterns will likely evolve in interesting ways. While some rural areas may experience population declines as residents move to urban centers, other rural areas may attract new settlers due to emerging opportunities. There is a possibility that this transition softens the rural-urban cultural divide.
In reality, though, it’s nearly impossible to predict the social consequences of everything that will unfold in the coming decades — regardless of what happens to beef.
Lesson #18: Global restoration potential by the numbers
Various teams of researchers have put the central hypothesis of this roadmap to the test. Several studies used integrated assessment models like GLOBIUM or biophysical accounting models like BioBaM. Another study used real-world farm-level data across 570 studies covering 38,700 farms in 119 countries. Here is a synthesis of their findings:
- Replacing 50% of animal-based food with novel plant-based alternatives by 2050 could unlock 653 million hectares for reforestation and natural regeneration — an area the size of the entire Amazon biome.
- At a higher plant-based replacement rate of 90%, the area of land available for natural regeneration jumps to about 1.37 billion hectares. This equates to an area the size of the entire United States and India that could be reclaimed by nature.
- In the 90% scenario, the food system transition would reduce annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by over 4 gigatons relative to 2020 (and over 5 gigatons relative to the baseline scenario in 2050). Reforestation and revegetation that would result from the abandonment of farmland would also remove nearly 7 additional gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. The net effect of a land-use transition of this magnitude would reduce annual GHG emissions by 11.9 gigatons, which is currently about 30% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions. This is the equivalent of decarbonizing the entire global electrical grid.
- Another study estimates the impact of replacing 50% of animal-based calories with plant-based calories only in regions where meat consumption is currently high, combined with reducing food waste by 50% across the supply chain. This would free up 430 million to 1.46 billion hectares for ecological restoration and stabilize biodiversity loss by 2050.
Poore and Nemecek (2018) [published study and supplementary materials]
- This comprehensive study estimates that replacing beef and sheep meat alone would unlock 1.9 billion hectares for revegetation — the size of the United States and China combined.
- Replacing 50% of animal-based food with plant-based food would achieve similar gains. It would unlock 2.07 billion hectares for revegetation and reduce GHG emissions by 10.4 gigatons per year — offsetting the emissions from the entire global transportation sector.
- Totally replacing animal-based foods by 2100 could reduce agricultural land use by 3.1 billion hectares. This would free up an area comparable to the size of the entire United States, Brazil, India, and Europe combined — representing 29% of all habitable land on Earth. Nature could reclaim 3 out of every 10 hectares of land that is capable of supporting vegetation.
Lesson #19: Global cooling
The overall ecological impact of this global land-use transition would extend far beyond the carbon cycle. Forests cool the climate by drawing water from the soil and releasing it into the atmosphere, which lowers near-surface air temperatures through evapotranspiration. This same process also increases cloud formation, which shields the Earth’s surface from sunlight and leads to further cooling. Researchers estimate that large-scale reforestation of this order would lower near-surface air temperatures by 0.48°C to 2°C in reforested areas.
One of the most compelling case studies for this phenomenon is the Eastern U.S., where the regrowth of 15 million hectares of forest since the 1930s contributed to regional cooling even as the rest of the world grew warmer.
Lesson #20: Ecological knock-on effects
The amount of land that would be returned to nature in any of the above dietary scenarios would set off a chain reaction of ancillary ecological benefits throughout the world. Cooler and wetter landscapes created by forest recovery help reduce the frequency and intensity of droughts and wildfires. Wetland restoration protects both homes and farmland from storms and severe flooding. Coastal rewilding provides a buffer against sea level rise and hurricanes.
Conclusion
All of the above ecological benefits can be achieved by collectively eating less ruminant meat — not because it’s the right thing to do, but because plant-based alternatives are cheaper and taste just as good. It’s certainly not the only solution, but it is the single biggest one.
As much as anything else humans can do right now, replacing beef is our best chance at restoring the health and stability of the biosphere in a relatively short time span. Doing so is a key buffer against societal unraveling and a prerequisite for increasing human prosperity. In short, it will help create a world that is more livable than it is today.
Call to Action
All governments need to do is shift subsidies and tax breaks from low-efficiency foods to high-efficiency foods. The private sector can take it from there. Farmers, agribusinesses, nutrition scientists, food producers, bioengineers, content creators, restaurants, supermarkets, and venture capitalists can then trigger this planet-wide transformation by developing and promoting plant-based foods that beat ruminant-based foods on price, flavor, and nutrition. If you build it, they will come. Once that happens, an enormous amount of land will progressively be freed from agriculture. That is the first step.
The next task is to guide the transition of abandoned farmland toward natural regeneration on a massive scale with minimal social friction. Most of this transition will occur automatically through the laws of supply and demand and the process of ecological succession.
This is how we save the biosphere. The bulk of this work can be done in two or three decades.
Jerry Toth co-founded a rainforest conservation organization in 2007 and then a regenerative chocolate company in 2013. Both organizations are working together to use food as a mechanism for large-scale forest restoration with local farmers. Their area of operations is the Pacific Forest of Ecuador — the heart of a global biodiversity hotspot and the ancient cradle of cacao. Learn more at Third Millennium Alliance (TMA) and To’ak Chocolate.
