Eating less meat and the impact on climate change

There are lots of reasons cited for eating less meat ranging from concerns about animal welfare to health issues. Increasingly it's the impact of meat production on climate change that is being highlighted. Meat production uses more energy, water and land than plant based foods and is a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. According to UN figures about 14% of all emissions come from meat production.

However, if you look at the data there are lots of complexities.

The impact of meat production varies by the type of meat: chicken and pork have the smallest climate impact, lamb is in the middle and beef is the least sustainable choice.

One of the problems is muddling the UK with the global situation. For example the environmental impact of beef farming varies dramatically depending on the farming practices. In say South America where deforestation is taking place the environmental impact is huge whereas the UK already has good pasture quality and effective management practices.

Cattle and to a lesser extent sheep produce methane mainly via burping. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas but unlike CO2 which has a cumulative impact methane only lasts in the atmosphere for about 12 years. This means that if the number of animals stabilises the level of greenhouse gases will also stabilise. Conversely a reduction in animals would have an immediate cooling impact.

Another complexity is that ironically intensive farming has a lower carbon footprint. For example the world’s largest ‘climate efficient’ pig farm in China is a 26 story sky scraper slaughtering over 1 million pigs a year equivalent to 25% of total UK pig production. Similarly intensively farmed chicken has a lower carbon footprint than free-range chickens.

In the UK agriculture uses 70% of all land of which 85% is used for livestock but this only provides 32% of the calories we eat. However, a lot of this land isn’t suitable for growing crops. Rewilding the least productive areas of grazing land and paying farmers to manage this would reduce climate change and be relatively easy to implement. Rewilding huge areas of pasture land raises questions about food security and about the risk of switching our meat consumption to imports with lower environmental standards.

The volume of meat we eat in the UK is actually on the decline.This is partly due to the rise in veganism and vegetarianism and partly that some people are trying to eat smaller portions of higher quality locally produced meat. Research also suggests that the decline is linked to cost issues which has resulted in smaller portions; meat being mixed with other proteins or meat being eaten less frequently.