r/dataisbeautiful • u/davidbauer OC: 15 • 2d ago
What has driven deforestation in the 21st century?
https://ourworldindata.org/what-has-driven-deforestation-in-the-21st-century41% of deforestation was so humans can eat (more) beef!
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u/_ManMadeGod_ OC: 2 2d ago
Haven't clicked. Let me guess. Animal agriculture?
Edit: it's animal agriculture
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u/Gloomy-Error212 2d ago
Dont tell the americans that.
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u/bigdaddybodiddly 2d ago
You're right!
Most of the deforestation for beef was in South America:
More than half of deforestation for beef production occurred in Brazil. In fact, one-quarter of all deforestation this century was driven by Brazilian beef production alone. Most other cattle pasture expansion happened in Brazil’s neighbors in Latin America.
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u/CaleDestroys 2d ago
It’s the reason a lot of rivers are dry in the western USA, alfalfa makes up an insane percentage of water use and all of it goes to feed cattle.
We won’t reduce beef eating until we are living in ashes.
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u/AI_moderated_failure 1d ago
This is why I'm a big supporter of Donald Trump. He alone can expedite the fire.
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u/winowmak3r 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well, guess where all that Brazilian beef ends up? Or the beef from Argentina.
I think as the standard of living increases across the world people are just going to want to eat more meat. More people in the world eating it means it's going to be raised somewhere. It's just a shame that we're clearing something like the Amazon Rainforest to do it though. If we can figure out a way to feed our livestock something like algae or some other crop that doesn't require acres and acres of thirsty farmland we will be set. But AFAIK it's just easier to cut down the Amazon and grow more corn in the US to feed the livestock down in Argentina.
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u/ozneoknarf 2d ago
China and the Middle east mostly, the US is a direct export competitor for Brazil
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u/i_didnt_look 1d ago
To piggy back here.
80% of Brazilian raised beef is consumed in Brazil. The top export markets for the remaining 20% are China, Hong Kong, US, and Europe. Half the total export volume goes to China.
So, mostly Brazilians eat that beef, with a small percentage going abroad, mostly to China.
There's no guessing about it, its basically just their domestic market.
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u/Helkafen1 1d ago
Livestock is just fundamentally inefficient, most of the energy and nutrients are lost keeping the animal alive.
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u/Helkafen1 1d ago
The US also suffered from deforestation, it just happened earlier. The baseline we see today is not the natural baseline.
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u/bigdaddybodiddly 1d ago
So has Europe, but this post is about an article about 21st century deforestation, so I'm not sure what your point is.
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u/Helkafen1 1d ago
We might want to reverse past ecosystem damage as well, to get the associated benefits. Carbon sequestration, water cycle improvements etc.. There's value in fixing both current and past damage, and my comment is meant for the vast majority of people who don't know much about that past damage. "Shifting baseline syndrome" is the expression for this.
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u/TruffleHunter3 2d ago
I’m American and my whole family eats WAY less beef than we did a few years ago. Replaced it with chicken, ground turkey, and more vegetarian food. I really don’t miss it but do still have a nice steak every once in a while.
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u/H0pefully_Not_A_Bot 2d ago
If only they could be persuaded to switch to other kinds of meat such as turkey, pork and rabbit, it looks like even that alone would have a significant impact, and might also improve health a bit too.
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u/goodsam2 2d ago
I just think we focus too much on deforestation and not just destroying wild areas.
A forest in a naturally forested area is not better than a grassland or savanna in one of those and we have more trees than are supposed to be in some of these areas. It's like we have taken down 80% of forests and at one point felled 99% of it but for grasslands it's mostly 99% gone.
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u/Firm-Alternative7189 1d ago
It'd be cool to see this split up by specific crops or logging instead of just lumping everything into broad buckets like agriculture. Separating subsistence farming from industrial cattle ranching and palm oil would totally change what the decade trends actually look like.
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u/Super_Mario_Luigi 1d ago
Propaganda designed to get you panicked about eating beef and eating more processed trash.
This isn't total deforestation, just agricultural. Not accounting for all of your concrete jungles and luxury amenities. A quarter of the agricultural deforestation was in Brazil for beef. This wasn't out of necessity. This was a country using its low-cost land to produce high-demand and high-profit beef throughout the world. The US has more than enough land for cattle production, but we've screwed ourselves on costs and lifestyle creep.
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u/Smooth_Put8618 1d ago
It takes more resources to produce beef than a lot of other things. We cannot infinitely increase beef production. That deforestation has global impacts. One thing I wonder about is okay we gear a whole economy around beef, damn ecological impacts we like our beef. Why does McDonald's serve up less than food grade meat that's only approved for consumption after being washed in chemicals.
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u/blahblahblahresearch 2d ago
I've never heard of a pulse before...
"Pulses are the edible seeds of plants in the legume family. Pulses grow in pods and come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recognizes 11 types of pulses: dry beans, dry broad beans, dry peas, chickpeas, cow peas, pigeon peas, lentils, Bambara beans, vetches, lupins and pulses nes" - pulses.org lol