Farmed fish vs Lamb: carbon footprint
Farmed fish or Lamb? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.
Farmed fish runs about 13.63 kg CO₂e a kilo. Lamb runs 39.72.
Lamb is the heavier choice, about 2.9× Farmed fish.
Swap Lamb for Farmed fish and you cut about 26.09 kg a kilo, near 66% off.
Per kilo, that gap is a 153 km drive in a diesel car.
Farmed fish: Farmed fish and shrimp pay for feed, energy to run the ponds, and sometimes cleared mangroves.
Lamb: Cows and sheep burp methane and need a lot of land and feed, which is why red meat towers over everything else here.
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.