Switching to a mainly plant-based diet is a great wayto cut your carbon footprint, and you can get started with your next meal. You don’t need to give up meat entirely, but cutting out as much red meat, chicken, pork, and dairy as you can will have a real impact.
The reason is simple. Growing meat creates more carbon emissions per kg of food than plants, so the more plants in your diet the lower your carbon footprint.
As an example, the carbon footprint of beef can be 20-30 times higher than potatoes, cereals (e.g. durum wheat for pasta), and seasonal fruit and vegetables. There are two main reasons for this.
1. Animals need food to grow, and growing that food creates more carbon emissions. This is especially true if the meat is fed on soy feed, which may come from deforested areas. This affects the carbon footprint of all animal products.
2. For beef there’s another factor which is that cows emit methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, due to the way they digest their food. This adds an extra source of emissions to the carbon footprint of red meat.