Chicken vs Farmed fish: carbon footprint
Chicken or Farmed fish? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Chicken runs about 9.87 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed fish runs 13.63.
Farmed fish is the heavier choice, about 1.4× Chicken.
Swap Farmed fish for Chicken and you cut about 3.76 kg a kilo, near 28% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 22 km drive in a diesel car.
Chicken: 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.