A new report from a team of UN scientists warns that we need to modify our diets and how we produce food in order to stem climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report uses input from 107 authors and analyzes over 7,000 research articles.

This development, on top of what Nathalie Graham noted in today's Slog AM post ("The global food supply is at risk because of climate change. Soil is being lost, places are turning into deserts, and the supply of food and water is being unprecedentedly strained."), should bring a greater sense of urgency to reduce harmful actions toward the environment. In other words, now would be an opportune time to go vegan. It's one small but key step in moving toward a sustainable world.

The report's authors conclude that the emphasis on maintaining livestock and cultivating rice increases methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that's about 30 times stronger than carbon dioxide. One way we can fight climate change is by restoring lost forests, which according this Vox article, "could soak up hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide."

Here are a few other important takeaways from the new IPCC report:

The last major IPCC report, released in October, looked at what it would take to limit warming this century to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That report found that it’s still possible, but the world may need to halve emissions by as soon as 2030, reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and become carbon-negative thereafter....

The new report shows there’s a huge opportunity to use land differently to emit less, restore ecosystems we’ve wrecked, and store more carbon. But it’s not simple: Conserving, restoring, and better managing land, as well as shifting diets to plant-based foods, requires coordination and careful planning, bridging fraught political and social fault lines....

Some of the biggest reductions in emissions relating to land will have to come from changing diets to consume less meat and fewer resource-intensive crops. The IPCC estimates that making changes to how we use forests, grow crops, and raise livestock could yield upward of 9 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions reductions per year by 2050. Changing diets could yield up to 8 gigatonnes in reductions: