Chicken vs Farmed shrimp: carbon footprint
Chicken or Farmed shrimp? 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 shrimp runs 26.87.
Farmed shrimp is the heavier choice, about 2.7× Chicken.
Swap Farmed shrimp for Chicken and you cut about 17 kg a kilo, near 63% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 100 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 shrimp: 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.