Country’s oldest university bans beef to fight climate change

Newsweek 28 September 2019

Portugal’s oldest university, the University of Coimbra, announced that it would stop serving beef for the first time in its 729-year history in an effort to combat the climate crisis, writes Hunter Moyler for Newsweek.

The beef production process is a known source of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, and the university's rector, Amílcar Falcão, said the decision marks an important step towards becoming Portugal’s first carbon-neutral institution of higher learning by the end of the coming decade.

“We are experiencing a climate emergency, and we have to put brakes on this projected environmental catastrophe,” Falcão said in a speech to hundreds of students, according to The Portugal News. Replacing beef with other sources of nutrients will “be a way of reducing the source of the greatest CO2 production that exists in the production of animal meat”.
Full report on the Newsweek site

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