For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Environment and Climate Resource Center page, Organic Transitions page and our All About Organics page.


   Rena Schild / Shutterstock.com

Today, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will take to the streets to fight for our lives. People’s Climate Marches are being organized in dozens of U.S. cities and a whopping 158 countries, from Burundi to Brazil to Nepal. Marchers are demanding international leaders to commit to serious emissions reductions and polluting industries to clean up their practices. Climate-impacted communities-from Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York City to indigenous peoples displaced by rainforest destruction in South America-will put a face on the urgency of this call to action.

We all know the bad news-melting ice caps, rising seas, mass extinctions-but here is the good: We actually have solutions at our fingertips; we just need the political will to embrace them. New data from Cornell, Univeristy of California at Davis, and Stanford University shows that we have enough clean energy sources to power our country. The Solutions Project is using that data to help all Americas access to clean energy, across all economic, demographic, and political divides.

We also have a blueprint for how to reshape the global food system so that instead of being one of the key drivers of the climate crisis, food becomes a central solution. Embracing a “low carbon diet” can help us both reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and survive on a hotter, less predictable planet.

Consider the worst culprits of global warming and you might think of dirty coal-fired power plants or gas-guzzling SUVs. While its true that the majority of current human-produced GHGs come from the fossil fuel industry, the global food system-from agricultural land use to processing plants and food waste in landfills-contributes to as much as one third of these emissions.

Finish Your Peas, the Ice Caps are Melting

While nearly one billion go hungry every year globally, we waste as much as half of all food we produce. That’s a tragedy for the hungry; it’s also tragic for the climate. Not only are GHGs produced in the process of growing and making that food, but the landfills where much of it ends up belch methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if food waste were a country, it would represent the world’s third largest GHG emitter, after China and the United States.

Around the world, folks are tackling the food waste problem with creative solutions. Urban Gleaners in Portland, Oregon is taking extra food going from restaurants and grocery stores and connecting it with food banks and other institutions in need. Love Food Hate Waste out of the UK has been pioneering education for reducing home and institutional food waste for years. And the Food Waste Recovery Network on U.S. college campuses has already saved more than 350,00 pounds of food since it was founded just two-and-a-half years ago.