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I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Here's a stat.

Nearly 40% of all the land on Earth is used for our food systems. That footprint is huge and it's

consequential. In his 2024 talk, sustainability scientist Jonathan Foley explains

why we cannot solve the climate crisis without taking on the challenge of food.

A plan to address this is coming up after the break. And now our TED Talk of the day.

It might surprise you to learn that the food we eat and the farms that grow it

and the landscapes we've cleared all contribute to climate change and contribute in a really, really big way.

Our job today is to figure out what we can actually do about it.

Well, this is also kind of a tricky topic, in part because there are just so many variables at work and so many processes,

but also it's a place of a lot of confusion and misinformation.

So how are we going to move forward together and try to figure out

something with clarity? Well to do that I like to listen to the data and see what it

tells us and see what we can learn from it. And the first thing the data tells us about our food system

is that it's really, really big.

It's about 38% of all the land there is on Earth.

To put that in perspective,

all the cities and suburbs on Earth cover less than 1% of Earth's land,

this is 38.

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