Did the World Health Organization ask member states to ban the breeding and reproduction of domestic animals to fight climate change? No, that's not true: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus emphasized the importance of implementing policies to improve more diversified, healthier and plant-based diets to fight climate change and did not ask for a ban on animal breeding at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok by user @life_racer207777 (archived here) on January 4, 2024. The caption (translated from Romanian to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
Vital announcement. Everyone out in the streets
They're moving ahead, but what about us? What are we doing?
The author in the video reads from an article (archived here), published on January 4, 2024, on the Romanian website Ziua News. It claims that a recent statement by Ghebreyesus revealed a so-called globalist plot to starve people to reduce the world population and said the plot calls for the organization to ban meat and dairy products under the pretext of combating climate change.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Jan 8 07:44:00 2024 UTC)
The article referred to a video message that the WHO director delivered for an official event of the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) called "Health, food and climate: A systems perspective for urgent climate action," organized by the Nordic Council of Ministers, Finland and WHO and live-streamed on December 11, 2023.
In his message, Ghebreyesus did not call for a ban on animal breeding or any other ban. Instead, he linked efforts to transform food systems to provide healthier, diversified and more plant-based diets as essential in the fight against climate change. He said:
Our food systems are harming the health of people and planet. Food systems contribute to over 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and account for almost one-third of the global burden of disease. Transforming food systems is therefore essential, by shifting towards healthier, diversified and more plant-based diets. If food systems delivered healthy diets for all, we could save 8 million lives per year.
He referred to two documents in particular during his address. The Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition -- I-CAN (archived here), launched in 2022 at COP27, by Egypt (as COP27 presidency) and the WHO, "aims to integrate the global delivery of climate change adaptation and mitigation policy action and nutrition and sustainable food systems to support bi-directional, mutually beneficial outcomes," and the COP28 UAE Declaration on Climate and Health (archived here), which calls for climate action to achieve "benefits for health from deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, including from just transitions, lower air pollution, active mobility and shifts to sustainable healthy diets."
The article suggesting that the United Nation's WHO is engaged in a conspiracy to depopulate the world has been previously debunked by Lead Stories.
