- Research suggests food systems are responsible for 30% of human-caused emissions globally, and 60% of that comes from animal-based products
- One-quarter of the land used for agriculture is for cattle, and they produce massive amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide
Cutting back on beef can greatly reduce your carbon footprint, studies show. Photo: BloombergWhen you are out for a meal at a restaurant next, without looking it up, try to find the most and least climate-friendly options on the menu.
Unlike a meal’s price, the greenhouse-gas footprint of food isn’t typically spelled out. But you don’t need to ask a climate scientist to find out either. There’s one simple trick for identifying the highest impact item on almost any menu: if there’s beef, that’s probably it.
Of course, maybe that’s not enough to change your order – sometimes you just want a good steak taco. Maybe you don’t think the climate impact of any given meal matters in the grand scheme of things. Here, too, there’s a simple rule of thumb: cutting back on beef makes a big difference. One 2022 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that swapping out beef for a single meal can reduce a person’s carbon footprint for that day by almost half. The more people who embrace such swaps, the bigger the dent in food-related emissions. There may even be health benefits, too.
“You don’t have to become a vegan to have a big impact on your carbon footprint,” says Diego Rose, a professor and director of the nutrition programme at Tulane University. “You just have to swap out beef.”
Food systems are responsible for roughly 30 per cent of human-caused emissions globally, according to a 2021 study in Nature Food. Other research suggests that nearly 60 per cent of that comes from animal-based products, which is largely a result of the land used for livestock – clearing forests and vegetation has a huge emissions impact – and the land and fertiliser needed to grow animal feed.
“All animal foods have a higher footprint than plant foods,” says Rose, because “you have to produce plant foods first and then feed it to the animals.”
Climate change impacts more than the environment: plane rides are getting shakier
Beef’s footprint is especially massive. For one, there are roughly 1.5 billion cows on the planet. About 13 million square kilometres (3.2 billion acres) of land is used to raise all that cattle, along with buffalo, and their food – one-quarter of all land used for agriculture, according to a 2017 paper in Global Food Security. Then there’s the methane. Cows and other ruminants have a unique digestive system that allows them to turn grass into fuel, but in the process their special gut bacteria releases methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
There is no universal figure for beef’s emissions impact, which varies by region, type of farm, grazing habits and other factors. But dozens of studies identify beef as among the most egregious emitters.
Globally, “ruminant meats produce about seven times as much emissions and use about seven times as much land as chicken and pork to consume the same amount of protein,” says Raychel Santo, a food and climate research associate at the non-profit World Resources Institute. “They use about 20 times as much land and produce about 20 times as much emissions as lentils and beans.”
Per capita beef consumption is starting to slow in some places, including the US and the European Union. It’s also projected to decline in many parts of the world over the next decade, according to a 2023 outlook from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the FAO. In the Asia-Pacific region, though, beef consumption is projected to keep climbing.
Climate anxiety is real: global warming hits the mental health of many
One response to the beef conundrum is to tinker with the cows. There’s a growing field of research geared at reducing ruminants’ methane output, whether by including seaweed, biochar and other additives in their feed or designing masks to capture their burps. Other solutions focus on improving breeding for cows that release less methane or reducing the amount of land being cleared for ruminant production.
Another option is to cut meat out of diets entirely. There’s no question that vegans and vegetarians have a smaller food-related carbon footprint than people who consume meat and dairy. But that’s a hard sell in many countries – in the US, only 5 per cent of people identify as vegan or vegetarian – and policymakers often avoid prescriptive guidance for fear of framing climate action as sacrifice.