What's the carbon footprint of eating meat?
Beef is the outlier: producing 1 kg emits roughly 60 kg of CO₂-equivalent — about ten times chicken. So your diet's footprint depends less on whether you eat meat than on which meat and how often. Enter a typical week below for your yearly estimate.
Your meat, per year
—
of CO₂-equivalent emissions
Freshwater behind it
—
per year, farm to plate
How it's calculated
The calculator multiplies each weekly portion (150 g cooked, a typical serving) by 52 weeks and by per-kilogram footprints — the same figures my No Meat Today app uses: roughly 60 kg CO₂e per kg of beef, 39 for lamb, 12 for pork, and 6 for chicken. Beef and chicken match the largest food-production meta-analysis to date, Poore & Nemecek (2018, Science); the lamb and pork figures run higher than its carcass-weight numbers, which count bone and trim and so understate the meat you actually eat. Water figures use commonly cited farm-to-plate freshwater estimates (about 15,400 L per kg of beef, less for other meats). These are global averages — your local numbers will differ, but the ranking and the orders of magnitude hold.
Keep reading
- Eat Less Meat, Cut Your Carbon Footprint: What Works
How much carbon eating less meat actually saves, why beef dominates the math, and which swaps cut your food footprint the most.
- How Much Meat Is Too Much Per Week? The Numbers
Health bodies suggest under 350–500 g of cooked red meat per week and minimal processed meat. What that looks like in real meals, and how to count it.
- How to Eat Less Meat: A Realistic Plan That Sticks
A practical, guilt-free plan to eat less meat: track first, swap easy meals, keep favorites, and build a habit that lasts.