High-income countries could remove 125 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from air -- more than the past three years' global fossil fuel emissions -- if they cut down on beef production by only 13 per cent, according to a study.

Researchers, including those from New York University, US, said that reducing beef production could serve as a "powerful complement" to, and not a substitute for, efforts directed at lowering fossil fuel emissions, which is core to tackling climate change.

As a means to lower emissions, scientists and environmental activists around the world are increasingly calling for drastic reductions in producing and consuming meat, including beef.

The study's authors said cutbacks in meat production in wealthier countries would reduce the land size needed for grazing cattle, therefore allowing forests to naturally regrow on what are currently pasturelands.

The "return of trees" would drive significant decline in fossil fuel emissions, which the team estimated to be about three years' worth of those worldwide.

"We find that removing beef-producing cattle from high-carbon intensity pastures could sequester (or remove) 34 gigatonnes of carbon i.e. 125 gigatonnes of CO2 into ecosystems, which is an amount greater than global fossil CO2 emissions from 2021-2023," the researchers wrote in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"This would lead to only a minor loss of 13 per cent of the global total beef production on pastures, predominantly within high- and upper-middle-income countries," they wrote.

High- and upper middle income-countries are viable for reducing beef production as some of their pasturelands do not produce much grass or exist where grass grows for a short season, the researchers said.

The pasturelands are also located in areas that could instead, grow vast forests with deep soils that work to remove carbon from air, they said.

The trend differed significantly from other regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South America, where much more pasture can grow year-round, producing more feed for animals per acre than northern countries, the research team said.

Further, lower-income regions could improve the efficiency at which cattle are fed on grass as a way to counter the minor loss in meat production from higher-income countries, they added.

"This isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. Our findings show that strategic improvements in the efficiency of cattle herds in some areas, coupled with decreased production in others, could lead to a win-win scenario for climate and food production," the study's lead author Matthew N Hayek, an assistant professor in New York University, said.

Modest changes to beef production globally could help achieve enormous climate benefits, Hayek said.

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