Climate justice, food justice, diet change: Making the connection, taking action Santa Barbara May 10 UCSB
http://climatejusticeproject.com/conference/
Session at the conference: Re-Imagining Climate Justice: At the Crossroads of Hope and Possibility, UCSB, May 10, 2014.

Presenters: David Cleveland (cleveland@es.ucsb.edu), Sarah Alami, Amelia DuVall, Quentin Gee, Lily Kingsbury, Justin Kroes, Ben Lerner, (Environmental Studies, UCSB); Elinor Hallström (Lund University, Sweden and Environmental Studies, UCSB); Gerri French (Sansum Clinic).

Time & Place: Lobero Room, bottom floor of UCen, UCSB; 2:45-4:00 pm (Conference starts at 9:00 in Corwin Pavillion: go here for more info and free registration for conference.)

To avoid catastrophic climate change requires not only making current human activity more efficient in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but decreasing and then stabilizing the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere. At the same time, we need to eliminate hunger and, by 2050, feed two billion more people. Yet our agrifood system is a major contributor to climate change.

Climate justice, food justice and diets are all intimately linked: diets of a minority of people in the richest nations (containing excess calories, sugar, fat, and animal and processed foods) contribute most to GHG emissions, to the scarcity of agricultural resources, to hunger, and to the rapid rise in non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Climate justice means those who have contributed, and continue to contribute, the most to climate change, do the most to mitigate it. Food justice means those who have contributed, and continue to contribute, the most to hunger and malnutrition, do the most to mitigate them. Diet change is a way to do both simultaneously. In fact, because our food system contributes more than 30% of GHG in the atmosphere, there can be no climate justice without food justice.

Diet change for climate and food justice means changes in diets and food policy of the most powerful and affluent, in order to reduce GHG emissions and increase the availability of good food for the least powerful, and stopping the encouragement for profit by the most powerful, of unhealthy diets among the least powerful.

The Santa Barbara Agrifood Systems research group (undergrads, grads, postdocs, faculty) will make the link between climate justice, food justice and diet at the global levels and national levels, and present ideas about how personal choice, grassroots advocacy and institutional policies can support diet change.

A panel discussion will follow with campus and community activists and the public, about how to promote diet change in ways that contribute to both climate justice and food justice. We will end with a demonstration of how to create low cost, low climate impact meals, using locally grown ingredients.

We hope to create a highly interactive conversation about local solutions by involving people with a range of interests related to the issue, and representatives from a range of campus and community organizations working on climate, food, and environmental justice.