Environmental impacts of meat and meat replacements

Abstract

Agriculture, especially the livestock sector, hugely stresses the environment through its climate change, land use, and water use impacts, among others. Hence, reducing meat consumption can greatly reduce agriculture’s heavy environmental burden. Meat replacements can deliver similar nutrients, and some even mimic meat to facilitate substitution. However, replacements come with their own environmental impacts, which can be highly uncertain, particularly for emerging replacements. This chapter synthesizes the environmental impacts of meat (poultry, pork, and beef) compared to conventional (seafood, eggs, tofu and tempeh, pulses, and nuts) and emerging (plant-based meat analogs, algae, mycoprotein, insects, and cultured meat) meat replacements. We compare their environmental impacts based on life cycle assessment and highlight impact hotspots, opportunities for improvement, and key research gaps. Overall, while conventional replacements already offer more sustainable alternatives to meat, emerging replacements often result in trade-offs that we can proactively tackle today to reduce environmental impacts in the future.