An Environmental Article used with permission from All-Creatures.org

Sailesh Rao explains the unprecedented urgency with which human society must step away from animal agriculture if we are to avert imminent environmental collapse.

A Vegan World in 2026?
From Sailesh Rao, ClimateHealers.org
July 2026

Images from Canva

“Persistence is the most traveled path to success” – Bryant H. McGill.

Dear Climate Healers,

Caroline Lucas begins her series with the question,

“What if the biggest threat to UK national security isn’t conventional warfare, hostile states, or terrorist networks, but rather the collapse of the natural world itself?”

For us, this is not news. We predicted the imminent collapse of the natural world by 2026 over a decade ago. We named our campaign Vegan World 2026, calculating that this would be the year the window closes.

The window is closing. Forests are burning, heatwaves are spreading, wild animal populations are collapsing and health care systems are going bankrupt under the weight of diet-driven chronic diseases, all roughly on this timeline. The environmental cost of animal farming is now widely acknowledged to be catastrophic.

Animal farming claims the majority of the world’s agricultural land while producing a minority of its food and calories, draining a disproportionate share of fresh water, driving deforestation across the Amazon and other irreplaceable ecosystems, polluting rivers and creating dead zones in the ocean, accelerating the loss of wild species, degrading ecosystems into deserts, seeding the environment with antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten human health, while delivering high levels of bio-accumulated toxicity in the foods it produces. This means that any serious strategy for healing the natural world, addressing climate change, water scarcity, deforestation, biodiversity loss, desertification or human health has to focus on shifting diets toward plant foods and creating a food system that is solely based on plants. In turn, this food system must be embedded within a “Planet B” Operating System for human civilization that is designed to achieve world peace and planetary health.

When the 2025 EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Alliance recommended a 50% reduction in the global consumption of meat and dairy, I wrote to the authors of the report seeking the design details of the new system that can accomplish such a 50% shrinkage of the animal farming sector. Would the new system retain the protein myth and the calcium myth of Planet A? Would it drop the endless growth myth so that it can accomplish the necessary 50% shrinkage?

I didn’t hear back from them.

In contrast, Planet B is a professionally designed system to heal the natural world as well as human beings. It calls for a 100% elimination of animal farming as it upends the dominant story of environmental destruction which puts fossil fuels at the center and treats animal farming as a footnote. The work published by Wedderburn-Bisshop in 2025, confirmed that when all eleven emissions species are accounted for, rather than the partial set the UN IPCC conventionally uses, 52% of the global heating since 1750 can be attributed to the animal farming sector alone. Hansen et al.’s 2025 revision of the CO2 doubling sensitivity from 3C to 4.5C pushes animal farming’s share to 66%, while the share for fossil fuels drops to 2%.

The reason the fossil fuel share shrinks is that burning fossil fuels also emits cooling aerosols like sulfur dioxide which mask a large share of their own warming in the short term, while methane and other emissions from animal farming carry no such offset. A strategy that phases out fossil fuels while leaving animal farming in place will certainly unmask that hidden warming and overheat the planet faster, not slower. Ending animal farming as soon as possible, while dialing down fossil fuel use in parallel, is the sequence that sensible systems engineering calls for.

The adoption of Planet B does not require waiting for new technologies. The infrastructure for a plant-based food system already exists today. Currently, grain and legume harvests are diverted to animal feed at a 39-to-1 loss in usable biomass by the time they reach the plate. Redirecting that harvest toward direct human consumption is a reallocation decision, not an invention. What has been missing is not a technical solution but the collective will to make the switch at the speed the underlying math demands.

That is precisely the gap we are trying to close through gatherings like V-COP, the quarterly Vegan Convergence Of the Peoples, where the specific mechanics of Planet B, its institutions, its infrastructure, and its economics, are worked out in public. The urgency is palpable. Our calculations based on land-use data, updated emissions science, biodiversity trends, and public health statistics, show that the time left to make this transition without irreversible loss were always going to run out around now.

Going vegan by the end of this year is not a symbolic gesture. It is the most direct action available to any individual or community which takes data and science seriously.

Registration for V-COP26 is open at https://climatehealers.org/v-cop. Join our discussions this weekend.

With much love,
Sailesh on behalf of the Climate Healers Core team. (Alex, Alison, Amit, Anne, Carl, Dakota, Dani, Deborah, Debra, Gabriele, Gerard, Giva, Jamen, Jim, Kelly, Ken, Krish, Krishna, Lisa, Liz, Madhuri, Maggie, Marco, Mike, Paige, Pareen, Paul, Ray, Rebecca, Sailesh, Sarah, Shankar, Stacey, Suzanne, Tami and Vega, the Cow and Climate Healer and her Veguitas)

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Posted on All-Creatures.org: July 22, 2026
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