Journal article
Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts
- Abstract:
- Modelled dietary scenarios often fail to reflect true dietary practice and do not account for variation in the environmental burden of food due to sourcing and production methods. Here we link dietary data from a sample of 55,504 vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters with food-level data on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, eutrophication risk and potential biodiversity loss from a review of 570 life-cycle assessments covering more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries. Our results include the variation in food production and sourcing that is observed in the review of life-cycle assessments. All environmental indicators showed a positive association with amounts of animal-based food consumed. Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% (95% uncertainty interval, 15.1–37.0%) of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% (7.1–44.5%) for land use, 46.4% (21.0–81.0%) for water use, 27.0% (19.4–40.4%) for eutrophication and 34.3% (12.0–65.3%) for biodiversity. At least 30% differences were found between low and high meat-eaters for most indicators. Despite substantial variation due to where and how food is produced, the relationship between environmental impact and animal-based food consumption is clear and should prompt the reduction of the latter.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s43016-023-00795-w
Authors
+ Medical Research Council
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/03x94j517
- Grant:
- MR/M012190/1
+ Cancer Research UK
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/054225q67
- Grant:
- 29186
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Food More from this journal
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 7
- Pages:
- 565–574
- Publication date:
- 2023-07-20
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-06-12
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2662-1355
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1341583
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1341583
- Deposit date:
-
2023-05-19
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Scarborough et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record