Greater than 20 scientific specialists have written to the UN’s meals company expressing shock at its failure to revise or withdraw a livestock emissions report that two of its cited lecturers have mentioned contained “a number of and egregious errors”.
The alleged inaccuracies are understood to have downplayed the potential of dietary change to cut back agricultural greenhouse gases, which make up a couple of quarter of complete anthropogenic emissions and largely derive from livestock.
Within the joint letter, which the Guardian has seen, the scientists say they’re dismayed that the UN Meals and Agriculture Group (FAO) has didn’t treatment “severe distortions” initially recognized by the lecturers Paul Behrens and Matthew Hayek, which the Guardian reported on earlier this 12 months.
Behrens and Hayek say a separate grievance has obtained brief shrift. They are saying a “technical dialogue” promised by the FAO by no means materialised, past an invite to a muted webinar the place they might sort questions right into a Q&A field.
“There was no severe response,” Behrens mentioned. “They partially addressed one of many factors within the webinar in an unscientific manner. However they gave no response in any respect to the overwhelming majority of our complaints. Our issues have barely been acknowledged, not to mention significantly engaged with. It’s been like hitting a brick wall. The FAO has made grievous errors that want pressing correction to keep up its scientific credibility.”
One of many signatories to the letter, Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and coverage on the College of Miami, in contrast the FAO’s complaints course of unfavourably with these of a science journal, “the place you may no less than count on a correction to the article”.
The FAO’s “pathways towards decrease emissions” research was initially billed as “an up to date complete overview” of world livestock emissions and was launched eventually December’s Cop28 local weather summit.
Behrens and Hayek mentioned it inappropriately used their work on now outdated nationally advisable diets (NRDs), double-counted meat emissions, combined completely different baseline years in analyses, and omitted the chance value of carbon sequestration on non-farmed land.
Correspondingly, the emissions financial savings from farming much less livestock have been underestimated by an element of between six and 40, Hayek estimated.
In an preliminary response to complaints, seen by the Guardian, the FAO’s chief scientist, Beth Crawford, described the report’s NRD-based emissions forecast for 2050 as “a tough estimate”. She mentioned: “This methodological selection was made as a result of there isn’t any international database on dietary preferences and no coverage instrument that helps the adoption of other diets primarily based on balanced environmental, financial and social standards.”
She didn’t contact on different factors raised by the pair, similar to alleged double counting and combined baseline years, which Hayek mentioned “are associated to their misuse of our scientific knowledge”.
Crawford’s response mentioned the FAO had obtained a “rigorous and thorough evaluate” supporting its conclusions from a bunch of scientists led by three named lecturers.
The joint letter, which was additionally signed by 78 environmental teams, mentioned: “It’s not acceptable for the FAO, a revered UN establishment, to gloss over these severe errors as a ‘tough estimate’ when the information and coverage suggestions it supplies are so internationally influential. The next commonplace of scientific rigour is required.”
Jacquet mentioned: “It appears clear to me that a number of the selections made by the FAO of their methodology have been simply there to uphold the established order of accelerating meat manufacturing and consumption.”
The FAO was contacted for a response.
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