CO2

Going vegetarian halves CO₂ emissions from your food

• 17:13 26 June 2014 by Michael Slezak
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If you stop eating meat, your food-related carbon footprint could plummet to less than half of what it was. That is a much bigger drop than many previous estimates, and it comes from a study of people's real diets.

As much as a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions come from food production. But it's not clear how much would really be saved if people swapped their beef steaks for tofu burgers. On some estimates, going vegetarian could cut out 25 per cent of your diet-related emissions. But it all depends on what you eat instead of the meat. With some substitutions,emissions could even rise.

So Peter Scarborough and his colleagues at the University of Oxford took data on the real diets of more than 50,000 people in the UK, and calculated their diet-related carbon footprints.

"This is the first paper to confirm and quantify the difference," says Scarborough.