Your stomach can fight climate change

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We all know that climate has a big impact on our food. After all, if there’s no rain and sunshine, crops don’t grow. But increasingly we’re learning that the way we grow our food has a big impact on the climate. In fact, we’re at a crisis point.

This episode of our Climate Solutions podcast looks at some of the research and innovation under way that’s rethinking what we eat and how we produce it, so that it will have a less damaging effect on the climate.

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In this episode you’ll find out:

• How often a forest the size of Luxembourg is destroyed to make way for agriculture
• How more efficient agriculture could cut the roughly 30% of food that is currently lost or wasted
• How big data is helping farmers track and better target their production. You’ll hear about GPS soil sampling that allows farmers to create soil fertility maps with information about a field’s nutrients, its pH level and other data. That enables farmers to make better decisions about which seeds to plant, where to plant them, and what kinds of fertiliser to use
• How many data points per year does an automated milking system store on a single cow? The answer is 200 000—but we’ll also tell you what they’re for
• How many people in the world are undernourished? It’s 821 million, and we’ll lay out some solutions to help feed them
• We’ll also have reassuring news for gastronomes. France throws away an estimated 10 million tons, or 10 billion kilos, of food each year—but the government has passed laws to ensure that restaurants and supermarkets give that food to needy people, rather than tossing it. We like that, because why, oh, why would anyone throw away French food?

If you’ve got something to say about climate in general or this podcast in particular, let me know @EIBMatt on Twitter. And don’t forget to subscribe to Climate Solutions.