The role of diet in phosphorus demand
By G. Metson, E. Bennett, James J. Elser. 2012
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over the past 50 years, there have been major changes in human diets, including a global average increase in meat consumption and total calorie intake. We quantified how changes in annual per capita national average diets affected requirements for mined P between 1961 and 2007, starting with the per capita availability of a food crop or animal product and then determining the P needed to grow the product. The global per capita P footprint increased 38% over the 46 yr time period, but there was considerable variability among countries. Phosphorus footprints varied between 0.35 kg P capita−1 yr−1 (DPR Congo, 2007) and 7.64 kg P capita−1 yr−1 (Luxembourg, 2007). Temporal trends also differed among countries; for example, while China’s P footprint increased almost 400% between 1961 and 2007, the footprints of other countries, such as Canada, decreased. Meat consumption was the most important factor affecting P footprints; it accounted for 72% of the global average P footprint. Our results show that dietary shifts are an important component of the human amplification of the global P cycle. These dietary trends present an important challenge for sustainable P management.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Nephrology, Rheumatology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb627c22c0d399c46d7771b04c43e62de6cc1f74
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Life's Bottleneck: Sustaining the World's Phosphorus for a Food Secure Future (2014, background): “Other examples of initiatives that provide cobenefits include the production of algae using nutrient-rich effluent (132) and a shift toward plant-based diets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and water and fertilizer demand (133, 134).”