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Brighter Green’s Participation in the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow

Brighter Green participated in COP26 this year, and Executive Director Mia MacDonald traveled to Glasgow in early November to attend the events. We were part of a number of coalitions and pushed world leaders to acknowledge and address the significant impact of animal agriculture and food systems on climate change, and the many ways in which rising global temperatures are affecting agriculture in urgent and devastating ways. Brighter Green collaborated with Feedback, ProVeg International, and other partners to host an official COP26 side event, No More Omissions: Addressing the Ambition and Scale of Change Required in Global Food Systems, on November 9th. You can watch the full event (about 90 minutes long) on YouTube here.

Read more below, and find more details, documents, and links to our work at COP26 here.

Official Side Event

In the side event, which was moderated by Mia MacDonald, we discussed the ways policy experts should address food systems issues, specifically the impact of livestock production on the climate, and how we can best make recommendations for decreasing emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and meeting the goals set by the Paris Agreement. The science surrounding climate change is clear. We need to take urgent action to ensure the planet is inhabitable for future generations. But policymakers are not heeding the recommendations the science has given. The panelists discussed the bold policies and programs already in place to create alternatives to our current unjust and unsustainable system of meat production and consumption, and how they should be scaled to address the problem at a global level.

You can read more about the side event on the COP26 page on our website.

Supporting the Work of Climate Activist, Vanessa Nakate

Brighter Green is a supporter of Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate’s work and vision, and we also worked on her book, a memoir and manifesto, which has just been published, “A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. We were pleased to see Vanessa accorded a number of platforms at this year’s COP26 and appreciate her dedicated activism on climate justice with other Fridays For Future leaders, in both the conference meeting rooms and the streets of Glasgow. She spoke several times at conference plenaries (one example), was featured on the cover of TIME, was quoted in The New York Times, and was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, among other notable achievements. We urge everyone to pick up a copy of her book, which amplifies her message that people from the global South are often not at the table when solutions to climate change are being discussed. The book tackles the issue head-on and features Vanessa’s personal story and that of many other young climate activists across Africa and on other continents.

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Recent News

November 2021 Newsletter

Read our latest newsletter here to learn more about what Brighter Green has been up to.

Having participated in the UN Food Systems Summit, we moved our focus to COP26, which is in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12. We are participating in an official COP26 side event called, No More Omissions: Addressing the Ambition and Scale of Change Required in Global Food Systems and we hope you will join us on November 9. If you can’t make the event, feel free to watch the events live streaming on our website here.

Brighter Green continues to work with global partners to advance policies that prioritize the climate, biodiversity, and wild and domesticated animals. Now more than ever, we must address our food system, and specifically unsustainable forms of livestock production, in order to reach the Paris Climate Agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Please read on for updates. As always, we appreciate your interest in Brighter Green and welcome feedback, questions, and new ways of thinking and doing. Please support our work by making a donation today.

 November 3, 2021
The Global Food Systems Summits: Restlessness and Resilience

Brighter Green has been participating in the UN Food Systems Summit, taking place today, online, from UN headquarters in New York City. We’ve also been following and supporting “counter Summit” organizing. Here is a blog published on Medium yesterday with our view on the Summits and the crucial systems change needed in the world’s food and agricultural systems, for human communities, non-human animals, and the planet as a whole.

It’s as if the future we worried about, in which Earth grows hotter and our ability to adapt doesn’t keep up the pace, has arrived. We can’t deny it. We know that the growth in greenhouse gas emissions has to be drastically reduced or the consequences we’re seeing will only worsen. Earlier this month, unprecedented rainfall engulfed New York, the city where I live. The transit system was flooded and shut down. Many people’s homes were filled with several feet of water, and a number of people died. Something similar and tragic happened in Zhengzhou, China in July, and floods, heatwaves, or droughts have become an unjust, recurring reality for millions of people across the global South.

About one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions come from the world’s food and agricultural systems. And these emissions are rising. A major reason is that the world is producing and consuming more meat and dairy products. The U.S., Brazil, China, and members of the European Union are the biggest livestock-producing countries. Many parts of the world are leaving behind the plant-forward ways of eating and rushing toward beef, chicken, cheese, and pork, sometimes three times a day. How much of this, I wonder, is people’s actual desire or the result of the massive marketing of meat and U.S.-style fast food, along with big agricultural corporations looking for new profit centers?

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 November 3, 2021
Engaging Academics to Counter the Growth of Factory Farming in Africa

 

There is overwhelming consensus between environmental scientists, climate-conscious policymakers, and animal rights and welfare NGOs that the scale of our current food system is unsustainable and detrimental to the climate, biodiversity, and farmed animal welfare. Africa has a fast-growing livestock industry that is relying more heavily on the factory farming model as the African population quickly expands. Yet, limited research has been conducted on the impacts of factory farming in the sub-Saharan Africa region.

To address this issue, Brighter Green applied for and received a Fueling Advocates Initiative (FAI) grant from the Tiny Beam Fund. (For further information on this project, including the final report and notes from the May 20th, 2021 webinar, please visit brightergreen.org/africaff.) The FAI grant supports non-profit organizations addressing the negative impacts associated with global industrial animal agriculture, especially concerning low- and middle-income countries. The grant also has a focus on academic research as an important driver for change. With the crucial support of this grant, Brighter Green engaged academics, researchers, and local activists in dialogues to build an evidence-based case against the growth of the industrial livestock model in several sub-Saharan African countries. Brighter Green prioritized the voices of African academics and researchers to assure that their perspectives drive discourse and a forward-looking research agenda.

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 September 2, 2021

No More Omissions: Addressing the Ambition & Scale of Change Required in Global Food Systems

This event was live streamed on November 9, 2021 at COP26 in Glasgow Scotland.

Brighter Green participated in an official COP26 side event called, No More Omissions: Addressing the Ambition and Scale of Change Required in Global Food Systems. 

You can watch the event in the embedded player below, or on YouTube.

Recent Events

A Global Dialogue Across Borders: Best practices – and bold visions – for ensuring sustainable, climate friendly food is equitable and accessible, and the essential role of international cooperation and youth activism in bringing this about

Food and agricultural systems have an enormous impact on human lives, especially in vulnerable communities, the lives of other animals, and the ecosystems and climate on which all species depend.
Learn More

 September 20, 2021
Joint Side Event at UNEA-4 in Nairobi, Kenya

The fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-4) is taking place from March 11-15, 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya. Learn More

 March 6, 2019
Brighter Green at COP24

Brighter Green will be at this year’s Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24 for short). It’s taking place from December 3-14, 2018 in Katowice, Poland. Learn More

 December 4, 2018

Our Mission

Brighter Green is a public policy action tank that works to raise awareness of and encourage policy action on issues that span the environment, animals, and sustainability. Based in New York, Brighter Green works in the U.S. and internationally with a focus on the countries of the global South and a strong commitment to ensuring and expanding equity and rights.

On its own and in partnership with other organizations and individuals, Brighter Green generates and incubates research and project initiatives that are both visionary and practical. It produces publications, websites, documentary films, and programs to illuminate public debate among policy-makers, activists, communities, influential leaders, and the media, with the goal of social transformation at local and international levels.

The Asia Program

Linking activists and organizations from across Asia and other parts of the world, the Asia Program focuses on the development of sustainable food systems through knowledge exchange and public education. Our work focuses on China, but we are expanding to countries across the continent. We have produced documentaries, published policy papers, organized speaking tours, and hosted conferences to foster critical, collaborative engagement on climate change and food systems across Asia.

Global Factory Farming

Intensive animal agriculture constitutes one of the greatest contributors to climate change. In an effort to expand awareness of the negative effects of factory farming, Brighter Green has produced policy papers, briefs, and short documentary videos that examine the globalization of factory farming through the lens of climate change, with a focus on the Global South.

International Climate Advocacy

Brighter Green collaborates with organizations from all over the world to bring attention to climate change and sustainable development. Through our International Climate Advocacy program, we empower individuals and groups to work together to resist deforestation, cope with erratic rainfall, and foster adaptation and resilience to climate change by creating paths to sustainable development.

Vegan America Project

Combining writing, presentation, and research, the Vegan America Project uses veganism as a lens through which to examine complex issues related to climate change. This project focuses on food security, animal welfare, and social transformation, and considers how the United States might reimagine food systems in the Anthropocene.