Sustainable meat consumption: global and regional greenhouse gas emission implications and counterfactual scenario analyses

Over the past decades, the significant high environmental impacts of meat consumption have drawn increasing attention around the globe. This study took 2018 meat consumption levels as baselines. It explored the emission implications of the more sustainable counterfactual healthy red meat diet (HRMD), healthy poultry meat diet (HPMD), and world balanced meat diet (WBMD). Meat commodity supply for human consumption data was extracted from the FAOSTAT database. The data were then adjusted for cooking and edible meat yields to obtain the cooked-and-edible meat. Emission factors obtained from published meta-analyses were used to estimate the emission implications of cooked-and-edible meat consumption. Counterfactual HRMD showed that adjusting 18 regions’ (10% of the world population) red meat consumption to a serving per day and poultry meat consumption to three servings per week equivalent could reduce the meat-related emission by 4%. The HPMD showed that further reducing red meat consumption in the HRMD to the world average in 21 regions (13% of the world population) and substituting the reductions with poultry meat could reduce the meat-related emission by 12%. WBMD showed aligning all regions’ meat consumption to a serving of each bovine, pig, and poultry meat per week, and the ovine meat consumption to the world average could reduce the meat-related emission by 21%. HRMD and HPMD could be the step-by-step transition strategies towards a WBMD to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and simultaneously address malnourishment issues.