Personally I have never attempted to be vegan but I have had times where I've been vegetarian, I haven't attempted to go vegan for two main reasons, firstly being I enjoy eating and using animal products and secondly I worry that it would not be the most healthy lifestyle for me. I say lifestyle rather than diet because I think it really is such a huge aspect of life to change as not only do you change what you eat but where you get food from and where you go out to eat.

Also such a radical change in diet can take time to adjust to but more worryingly than that for me is that a vegan diet just isn't healthy for everyone and some people can't sustain themselves and be healthy on a vegan diet, there is then the option for supplements but you have to find vegan and environmentally friendly ones and then buy them which all just seems a huge amount of effort and added expense. However for this post I want to look at the situation as if money was no object.

Globally:

On a larger scale I also think it is debatable whether it would actually be beneficial for the majority of people to become vegan because a lot of infrastructure would have to change along with a big shift in jobs. It really would change so many aspects of life, culture and much more. It really is hard to predict everything that would happen with such a bug change and I find it rather frustrating that media outlets, blogs, videos, whatever for if media it is, seem to all speak on this debate with blatant bias, it is hard to find anyone coming from a neutral standpoint, they are either vegans or anti-vegan so you always get the 'If we were vegan it would be all rainbows and sunshine or dark clouds and storms.'

So I'm going to do my best to stay neutral and I think I will be able to as I am still forming my opinion and am not on the pro or anti vegan side of the debate, I just like to look at what we know and our most accurate predictions and work from there.

Farming:

Firstly if we were to all become vegans it is estimated that around 1 billion people would lose their jobs because the meat industry is so large, though I see a little more to it than this. Even though people would lose jobs a lot of the jobs would be replaced as plants still need to be grown on a larger scale and with a wider variety, so I would say it's likely that a lot of people in this 1 billion would not be loosing jobs but rather just having a change in job description.

A large part of jobs that would be lost would be in factories with the various jobs that come with preparing meat to be sold, without meat you know longer need the factories which takes jobs but would be hugely beneficial to the environment. However crops still need to be picked, sorted, cleaned and packaged which would take place in factories. So it's likely that some factory workers would be able to stay in work, however many factories would still be running so the environmental benefits would not be as large as originally predicted.

Variety is also I big hindrance in people becoming vegan because to have a healthy balanced diet with no animal products you would need to eat a lot of different types of food to replace that vital nutrients and most countries can't grow a wide enough variety of foods, so extremely large quantities of food would now need to be transported globally which is extremely bad for the environment.

If you didn't want to transport the food because of the implications on the climate you would then have to build various facilities to grow a wider variety of food which means jobs, more people will get reemployed to build and work in these facilities. However then you have to get materials to build the facilities and then once they are built you need to keep them up and running at certain temperatures, lighting and humidity which is a lot of added strain on the environment.

Space:

With people no longer eating meat there would be a lot more space for added facilities and land for farming, it is estimated that if we stopped farming animals globally it would free up space around the world equivalent to the size of Africa and that is a lot of free space. This space only comes about because you don't need the space to hold animals and all the space involved in feeding, killing, and preparing them, though you still have to deal with the 3.5 billion odd of cows, pigs and sheep. let alone the estimate over 10 billion chickens and various other animals we now have no need for. If we just left them they would still be taking up space and farting the environment into oblivion, so we could release them and have some be killed by wild animals some die because they need to be sheered or looked after in some way or another and then the remainder would find their place in the ecosystem and live on. However you would then have to deal with the dead bodies of billions of animals rotting that would have been consumed before and honestly I have no clue what we would do with them.

Ecosystems:

No longer farming animals would allow the natural ecosystems to work their way back into what they would natural be which over time would boost native species of plants and animals, restoring natural beauty to many areas. However in some areas releasing all the farmed animals into the delicate ecosystem could throw things of quite badly and it could cause irreversible change that could be good or bad depending on perspective and outcome which you couldn't accurately predict until it happened. Which means we would have to spend a lot of time figuring out what we release, where we release it and what it will do to other animals and plants, which would likely mean people would be employed to survey areas and constantly update the necessary parties on any changes that are happening.

Water:

Animals need insanely large quantities of water depending on size, activity and environment so if we were to stop farming animals it would free up insanely large quantities of water which would not only help areas that suffer from awful drought but it could also prevent current and future wars because at the end of the day food and water are vital to survival and if people are going to die because of a lack of water they will fight to try and survive it's just human nature. So the influx of water would be a huge benefit globally and it wouldn't produce any more emissions because water is being transported to feed animals anyway so the course would just change slightly. With more people not having to fight for water or spend the majority of their time fetching water they would now be able to spend their time on whatever they choose to fill that time.

Animal products:

I can't list to you all of the animal products that are used today because there are just to many. Many products we use in our daily lives are derived from animals in one way or another so if we were to stop using animal products as a whole we would have to find replacements which means taking the needed ingredients from other places which would likely be plants and minerals. Replacing some products would not be too much of an issue as there are many ways people are taking DNA from animals or plants and putting them into other plants so that they can produce a much needed resource and with all the added space and water from not farming we should be able to produce a lot of products without too much hassle. However we would still need new facilities to extract the needed substance from the plants to make them into useful materials which means more emissions and again not all countries can grow all plants so they would need to either import goods or build more facilities which is some added strain on the environment but still I would assume it wouldn't be producing more emissions than the alternative.

Though we can't create all of what we need from plants alone so we would likely have to turn to minerals to make what we need which means getting deep into the ground, getting materials out of the ground and them processing them and making them into supplements or various other unrelated products. As we all know getting minerals from the ground is not an easy job that puts a lot of strain on the surrounding environment, the strain is dependent on methods used. Then all the emission produced from collecting sorting and making these minerals into needed products would probably worse for the environment than taking them from animals but I can't be 100% sure on that.

Oceans and water ways:

The oceans and water ways are some of the worst impacted areas by over fishing and climate change because many species of fish fresh water or salt water are very delicate and small changes in their environments can have fast and drastic negative impacts on many species, let alone over fishing and various methods of fishing that catch entire schools of fish and anything else in the area at the given time killing off many species that we are't even eating, they are just caught in the cross fire.

With people halting fishing the various species that live in oceans and water ways would quickly begin to bounce back and repopulate which would help balance out the ecosystem and we would likely see some of the fastest positive results in any area, with the natural populations coming back it would also help the environment of the oceans which would have a knock on impact onto the land, and over time as the oceans and water ways healed it would help climate change as a whole, though the progress on land would still likely take some time.

Small communities:

If the world was to become vegan it would not be possible for smaller communities that live much further out in the wild or still live as tribes so they would either have to abandon their way of life that has not changed in god knows how long, which I think would be an awful thing to happen, or the world would have to allow these small communities to keep their ways of life and traditions as they tend to be self sustainable and don't cause harm to the environment in the same way modern cities do as they live simpler lives and they often have a lot more respect for nature so they treat it well.

Overall:

Overall I think the main impact of the world becoming vegan would first be seen in the oceans as I believe we would quickly see a lot of positive change in environments returning to its natural state, though for temperatures to return to a natural level it would likely still take some time.

However on land I think it is really hard to say how much of a positive impact it would have on the environment because we would still be pumping out tons of emissions in our efforts to replace animal products and food though I still think we would see a positive change but it would likely take a long time and a lot of changes in other areas before people saw the real benefits which I doubt would be properly seen for a few generations.

Honestly I don't think anyone could predict the results of the world becoming vegan extremely accurately and it is hard to say if the change would be positive or negative but I for one thing it would likely have a slow moving positive impact on the environment. Let me know your thoughts in the comments, upvote if you enjoyed and follow for more.