The plan goes farther than any other country has so far to tackle emissions from the food chain, which is responsible for around a quarter of the world’s total carbon footprint.
On farms in Denmark, the government will soon pay farmers to turn some of their land into forests instead. In other areas, farm fields will revert to peatlands. In total, around 10 percent of the country will be restored to nature. It’s one part of a plan to help steeply cut the country’s emissions from farming. Separately, a new tax on cows - dubbed the Flatulence Tax - means that farmers also won’t produce as much meat and milk. And some farm subsidies will be redirected to help farmers use less nitrogen fertilizer.
“This seems to be the first serious plan anyone has agreed to with real money and real teeth to reduce agricultural emissions,” says Tim Searchinger, a senior research scholar at Princeton.
Earlier this year, the Danish government announced the world’s first ever national action plan for shifting its population towards plant-based diets in order to help radically reduce the country's climate footprint. Indeed, the country has an ambitious goal to cut emissions 70 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels, and there’s strong political will to hit the target.
“With Danish politics, when you make political agreements, parties tend to stick to them even across elections,” says Torsten Hasforth, chief economist at Concito, a Copenhagen-based green think tank. “There’s an ability to have some consistency and do some long-term planning. We’ve been taking one sector at a time and seeing how we can ensure that sector delivers enough to realize the goal of 70 percent.”
Denmark has already embraced wind power, solar, and newer tech like the world’s largest heat pump. In Copenhagen, most people bike to work; a new tax on flights out of the country is designed to encourage more people to take the train for short trips and help shift domestic flights to sustainable aviation fuel. The country has done enough in other areas for climate that agriculture is responsible for a growing chunk of its overall carbon footprint - at least 50 percent. Hence the need for the brave, radical, world-leading agricultural strategy Denmark is pursuing.
Hedonistic Sustainability: The cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world, in Denmark's capital city, is topped by an artificial ski slope that's open all year round.
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