Beef vs Farmed fish: carbon footprint
Beef or Farmed fish? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Beef runs about 99.48 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed fish runs 13.63.
Beef is the heavier choice, about 7.3× Farmed fish.
Swap Beef for Farmed fish and you cut about 85.85 kg a kilo, near 86% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 503 km drive in a diesel car.
Beef: 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.