Abstract
Low-meat and no-meat diets are increasingly acknowledged as sustainable alternatives to current Western food consumption patterns. Concerns for the environment, individual health or animal welfare are raising consumers’ willingness to adopt such diets. Dietary shifts in Western countries may modify the way human-environment systems interact over distances, primarily as a result of existing trade flows in food products. Global studies have focused on the amount of water, land, and CO2 emissions embodied in plant-based versus animal-based proteins, but the potential of alternative diets to shift the location of environmental impacts has not yet been investigated. We build on footprint and trade-based analyses to compare the magnitude and spatial allocation of the impacts of six diets of consumers in the United States of America (USA). We used data on declared diets as well as a stylized average diet and a recent dietary guideline integrating health and environmental targets. We demonstrate that low-meat and no-meat diets have a lower demand for land and utilize more crops with natural nitrogen fixation potential, yet also rely more widely on pollinator abundance and diversity, and can increase impacts on freshwater ecosystems in some countries. We recommend that governments carefully consider the local impacts of the alternative diets they promote, and minimize trade-offs between the global and local consequences of dietary shifts through regulation or incentives.
Highlights
A continuation of current dietary, demographic, and economic trends would drastically increase global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land clearing, and biodiversity threats caused by global food production by 2050 (Tilman and Clark, 2014)
We demonstrate that low-meat and no-meat diets have a lower demand for land and utilize more crops with natural nitrogen fixation potential, yet rely more widely on pollinator abundance and diversity, and can increase impacts on freshwater ecosystems in some countries
Low-meat or no-meat diets have strong global benefits in terms of land use and GHG emissions (Aleksandrowicz et al, 2016) related to agricultural production, our results indicate that the regional consequences of promoted alternative diets have to be considered
Summary
A continuation of current dietary, demographic, and economic trends would drastically increase global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, land clearing, and biodiversity threats caused by global food production by 2050 (Tilman and Clark, 2014). Richer in plant-based food and with fewer livestock products, shows potential to lower negative environmental impacts and simultaneously contribute to decreasing the risk of chronic non-communicable diseases worldwide (Tilman and Clark, 2014; Nelson et al, 2016). Livestock products (excluding fish) account for 12% of the energy content of this diet, compared with a higher average of 29% in current Western diets (FAO (2019) for 20131). The EAT diet derives a higher share of energy content from cereals, vegetables, legume crops, and nuts (Willett et al, 2019)
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