Rice vs Farmed shrimp: carbon footprint

Rice or Farmed shrimp? Here's what each one costs the climate, measured per kilo over its whole life.

Rice runs about 4.45 kg CO₂e a kilo. Farmed shrimp runs 26.87.

Farmed shrimp is the heavier choice, about 6.0× Rice.

Swap Farmed shrimp for Rice and you cut about 22.42 kg a kilo, near 83% off.

Per kilo, that gap is a 131 km drive in a diesel car.

Rice: Modest. Fertiliser, the field itself, and a bit of milling.

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.

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Figures from OWID / Poore & Nemecek 2018, licensed CC-BY 4.0.
How we get these numbers: Methodology.