Files
Abstract
The new found popular interest in sustainable development is highly skewed towards areas that
are politically visible, such as transport and in particular the evils of air travel. This situation is
mirrored in the academic community with an explosion of articles on sustainable transport (an
EBSCO web search yielded 552 academic references to Sustainable Transport while for example
Sustainable Livestock only found less than 10% of that number1). Nonetheless, only 14% of
GHG’s actually result from transport, with as little as 2% coming from aviation, against 32%
resulting from agriculture and land use – a major part of which can be directly attributed to the
food chain (Stern, 2006). Moreover within the food system, certain areas such as livestock production
are particularly problematic with meat and dairy products contributing more than 50%
of the total GHG’s emitted (Kramer et al, 1999). Another recent study in the UK shows that
GHG emissions attributable to meat and dairy consumption are about 4 times more than the
GHG emissions generated from fruit and vegetable consumption (Garnett, 2007).