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Meat & Dairy

Climate Impact:

What you can do

Minimise the amount of meat and dairy you consume, and eat red meat once a week or less. 

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Make an effort to reduce your meat and dairy consumption, particularly red meat.  If that's only a little at first, that's great.  If you're vegan, vegetarian or have a low meat diet already - please confirm you take this action already (below).

Who's doing it?

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How this works

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Climate impact

Moving from an high meat-eating diet to a low-meat diet prevents about 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions a year - the same amount that's absorbed by around 60 trees (see below for calculations).

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Red meat is the highest emitter. Eating a beef burger has the same emissions as driving a car around 25 miles [1][2]. 

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See tips and resources below for detailed comparison of animal products.

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Additional benefits

  • Cheaper food shops

  • Reduced cholesterol [3]

  • Reduced contribution to animal cruelty

Challenges

  • Difficulty of changing eating habits

Resources

  • Check out these top vegetarian cookbooks (US and UK)​

 

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How this works

Tips

  • Make certain days of the week meat free days (ideally more meat free days than meat eating).

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  • Learn how to cook great vegetarian food (see resources for ideas).

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Facts and further information

  • We eat around a million tonnes of meat a day [4].

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  • Livestock accounts for around 15% of all man made emissions [5].

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  • 50% of the habitable land on earth is used for agriculture. 77% of that agricultural land is used for livestock, including animal feed production (equates to 38% of habitable land). Yet meat and dairy provide only 18% of humankind's global calorie supply [6].

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  • Replacing beef with chicken can halve your dietary emissions [7].

Ask the Meat & Dairy group
Impact
Impact assessment

Average daily dietary GHG emissions of high-meat eaters in UK [8] = 7.19 kg CO2e
Average daily dietary GHG emissions of low-meat eaters in UK [8] = 4.67 kg CO2e

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Average annual dietary GHG emissions of high-meat eaters in UK (7.19 x 365 days) = 2.62 tns CO2e
Average annual dietary GHG emissions of low-meat eaters in UK (4.67 x 365 days) = 1.70 tns CO2e

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Average annual reduction in emissions from changing from high-meat diet to low-meat diet = 0.92 tns CO2e

References

  1. https://www.sixdegreesnews.org/archives/10261/the-carbon-footprint-of-a-cheeseburger

  2. https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/environment

  3. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/4-ways-to-eat-your-way-to-lower-cholesterol

  4. https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/consumption/foods-and-beverages/world-consumption-of-meat

  5. http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ https://www.sixdegreesnews.org/archives/10261/the-carbon-footprint-of-a-cheeseburger

  6. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/environment

  7. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment/2019/06/choosing-chicken-over-beef-cuts-our-carbon-footprints-surprising-amount

  8. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-014-1169-1 

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