THE ONE EARTH PROJECT

Studies estimate that, from the beginning of time, 113 billion people have ever lived on Earth (source: Population Reference Bureau).

Globally, more than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered every year for food consumption (based on FAO data), including:

• 75.2 billion chickens
• 7.8 billion laying hens
• 1.5 billion pigs
• 533 million rabbits
• 515 million turkeys
• 504 million goats
• 308 million cattle

(Source: FAO 2022)

According to studies:

• 1.1 to 2.2 trillion individual wild fish are caught globally each year
• around half of all fish caught – between 490 and 1,100 billion – are used for reduction to fishmeal and oil, which are mostly fed to farmed animals
• since 1990, farmed finfish numbers killed annually for food have increased nine-fold, to 124 billion in 2019

(Sources: Animal Welfare 2023 and 2024)

(Source: FAO and FAO)

• food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (Nature 2021)
  
• between 1990 and 2020, around 420 million hectares of forest (mainly tropical forest) has been lost and a further 10 million hectares, an area the size of Scotland and Wales combined, is being lost each year. (The Royal Society)
• agricultural expansion drives almost 90 percent of global deforestation (FAO 2021)
• as species vanish at a rate not seen in 10 million years, more than 1 million species are currently on the brink (Reuters 2022)
• Every year about 1% of global land deteriorates and the amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of what it was in 1960 (FAO)

Every year, some two million people, mostly in low- and middle-income countries, die from neglected zoonotic diseases. In 2020 UNEP identified seven trends driving the increasing emergence of zoonotic diseases, including:

• increased demand for animal protein;
• a rise in intense and unsustainable farming;
• the increased use and exploitation of wildlife;
• the climate crisis.

(Source: UNEP 2020)