Following the previous post on the climate, I’ve taken a closer look at the numbers involved.
According to Pawprint, the average CO2 footprint per person in the UK is 12.7 tonnes per year [1]
Interestingly, A calculation from 2017 gives a much lower value of 8.34 metric tons [2]
Pawprint numbers are validated by Mike Berners-Lee [3], author of There Is No Planet B [4] so it’s reliable data. The difference may be due to Pawprint including the CO2 footprint incurred from imported goods and overseas air flight and shipping. The lower value is misleading because it has ‘offshored’ part of our environmental impact.
Berners-Lee has also produced a Simple formula to cut your diet’s carbon footprint [5]. In it he calculates the CO2 associated with one kilo of a number of food products. For example …
Tofu (a good meat-free protein source) 1.5 kg CO2
Quinoa (a good meat-free protein source) 1.6 kg CO2
UK produced chicken generates 3.8 kg CO2
UK produced beef generates 25.0 kg CO2
Imported beef steak from deforested land generates 83 kg CO2
Although there is some uncertainty over the exact values, it is clear that there are very large differences between meat and non-meat foods.
An article, Reducing Our Environmental Impact [6], highlights research from the University of Oxford which found that cutting meat and dairy products from the diet could reduce an individual’s carbon footprint from food by up to 73 per cent.
Food accounts for 10-30% of a household’s carbon footprint, so we could be cutting around 1.8 tonnes each per year by moving to a plant-based diet.
This is one of the quickest and most effective changes to make in order to cut our carbon footprint.
The remaining 80% may not be so easy!
The chart at the top of the post shows Greenhouse Gas contribution by food type in the average diet (Centre for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan) [7]
[1] https://www.pawprint.eco/eco-blog/average-carbon-footprint-uk
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/british-carbon-footprint-africa-emissions-oxfam-climate-change-a9271861.html
[3] https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/people/mike-berners-lee
[4] https://theresnoplanetb.net
[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/carbon
[6] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/veganism-environmental-impact-planet-reduced-plant-based-diet-humans-study-a8378631.html
[7] https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability-indicators/carbon-footprint-factsheet
