Greta Thunberg, a Swedish climate activist, wants to change the way the world produces and uses food to combat three threats: greenhouse emissions, epidemic spreads, and animal cruelty.
In a video posted on Twitter on Saturday, Thunberg said that reforming how food is grown would minimize the environmental effects of farming as well as disease outbreaks like COVID-19, which is thought to have arisen in livestock.
“Our relationship to nature is broken. But relationships can change,” In a video commemorating the International Day of Biological Diversity, Thunberg said.
Thunberg has previously based her ire on policymakers and greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels, but an emphasis on agriculture and tying the climate issue to health pandemics is a different twist for her.
Thunberg claims that agricultural practices are to blame for disease transmission from livestock to humans and that switching to a plant-based diet might save up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 per year.
According to the World Health Organization, the coronavirus most likely spread from bats to humans by another species, and scientists estimate that 60 percent of infectious human diseases that occurred between 1990 and 2004 were caused by animals.
