News - 19 September 2014

An Urgent Call to Action from Paul McCartney

Paul McCartney calls on people to back #MFMclimatepledge ahead of the UN Climate Summit on Tuesday 23rd September 2014.

With just days to go until the UN Climate Summit in New York, Paul McCartney has called on people to back the Meat Free Monday Climate Pledge campaign.

#MFMclimatepledge - launched at tibits on Monday 8th September by the RT Hon Greg Barker MP, Energy and Climate Advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, and Stella and Mary McCartney - aims to get people to commit to a weekly meat free day so that global leaders can see the magnitude of support and enable them to take the idea forward.

Tuesday's UN Climate Summit will be the first time global leaders - from government, finance, business, and civil society - will meet to tackle the subject of climate change since Copenhagen in 2009. #MFMclimatepledge wants the leaders to commit now to agreeing an ambitious climate treaty at the COP 21 Conference in Paris next year, with the subject of meat reduction firmly on the agenda.

As well as being responsible for a huge chunk of global greenhouse gas emissions, meat production requires increasingly unsustainable levels of precious resources - land, water and energy - and is a major contributor towards global environmental degradation.

30% of all the land on Earth is already used for livestock and feed production. So with the world's population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, raising enough animals to keep up with our current meat-heavy diets spells disaster for the planet. In fact, if everyone in the world ate as much meat as those in western countries, we would need 4 to 5 more planets to sustain ourselves!

Please take a couple of minutes to visit http://pledge.meatfreemondays.com, pledge to go meat free for one day a week and share the idea with others.