Beef (from dairy cows) vs Farmed fish: carbon footprint
Beef (from dairy cows) or Farmed fish? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef (from dairy cows) runs about 33.3 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed fish runs 13.63.
Beef (from dairy cows) is the heavier choice, about 2.4× Farmed fish.
Swap Beef (from dairy cows) for Farmed fish and you cut about 19.67 kg a kilo, near 59% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 115 km drive in a diesel car.
Beef (from dairy cows): Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
Farmed fish: Farmed fish and shrimp pay for feed, energy to run the ponds, and sometimes cleared mangroves.
Per-kilo numbers skip portion size and how the food was farmed, so take them as the shape of things, not the last word.
More match-ups
Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.