Which meat leads to fewer emissions: beef, chicken, lamb or pork?
This isn’t going to please everyone, but the least carbon-intensive meat is battery-reared chicken. A 2006 study by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Department of the Geophysical Sciences found that intensively reared chicken generates 1.67g of “CO2 equivalent” per Kcal. By comparison, grain-fed beef (13.82g), pork (9.03g) and lamb (25.97g) cause far more emissions. The key word in all this is “grain fed”. The Sustainable Development Commission, the government’s independent advisory body on sustainability, recently concluded that, where possible, we should choose meat that is “grass-fed”. But it also said we should aim to eat fewer meat and dairy products to improve our health and reduce emissions.
