From hamburgers to holidays: Modelling the climate change impact of reducing meat consumption according to UK consumer preferences

Abstract

The climate impact of food is rapidly gaining attention. Studies focus on global and national impacts, marginalising the role and preferences of individual consumers. Diet is highly personal and for changes to be widely adopted they should be consistent with peoples' lifestyles, preferences, tastes, and knowledge. We construct global scenarios of reducing meat consumption and model their carbon mitigation potential to 2050. We conduct a simple survey to explore UK consumers' preferences for different approaches to reducing meat consumption, which are used to develop scenarios, and units for communicating the associated portion sizes and emissions savings. Results from our survey suggest that modest reductions in meat consumption are more resonant (e.g., eating three portions per week) rather than absolutes (becoming vegan for one month) or abstractions (consuming 170 cal of meat per day). Similarly, tangible analogies such as number of airline flights are preferred over raw emissions abated. We find that reducing meat intake to recommended healthy levels (92 cal per day) and avoiding ruminant meat could almost halve production-phase GHG emissions from the food system. Our survey illustrates how such information can be rephrased for more engaging communication: “reducing your meat intake to three times per week is equivalent to avoiding six short-haul return flights each year”.