November 17, 2014

Greenhouse gas emissions of traded meat increase 19%

Without possibly knowing it, meat-exporting countries are contributing to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the countries where the meats are destined for and consumed.

An international team of researchers has found that emissions embodied in beef, chicken and pork have increased by 19% over the past 20 years. The team gave particular attention to methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) released into the atmosphere when producing meat from livestock since previous studies had quantified the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions embodied in traded meats.

The research found that Russia was the biggest importer of embodied emissions in meat over that period, mostly coming from Brazil and Argentina. It said Russia consumed more emissions than it produced.

Internal trade flows of emissions between European countries were also revealed by the study, whose results were published last week in Institute of Physics Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters. 

The researchers—from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the University of Siena and University of California Irvine—found that direct emissions of CH4 and N2O from livestock worldwide represent around 9% of total anthropogenic GHG emissions.

The analyzed data from 237 countries showed that during the period 1990-2010, 36.1 metric tonnes (Mt) of CO2-equivalent (CO2-eq) emissions were related to meat produced in one country and consumed in a another country.

The largest amounts of embodied emissions were from beef (26.7 Mt of CO2-eq), pork (7.3 Mt of CO2-eq) and chicken (2.1 Mt of CO2-eq).

In Europe, meat exported by France to Italy and Greece embodied 1.4 Mt and 1.2 Mt of CO2-eq emissions, respectively, and meat imported by Italy from Poland, Germany and Netherlands embodied 0.7, 0.6, and 0.7 Mt of CO2-eq emissions, respectively.

"Our analysis of livestock emissions embodied in the international trade of meat highlights the regional variation in emissions intensities and quantifies a significant barrier to effective regional and national policies regulating livestock emissions. A developing country, for example, may lack specific infrastructure and therefore emit large amounts of GHGs when producing meat from livestock. These emissions can be increased when demand from more developed countries is placed on this country to produce more meat. At the moment, all existing policies neglect any emissions embodied in trade, so countries are not accounting for the emissions they may be causing in other countries," said lead researcher Dario Caro, of the Carnegie Institution for Science (Stanford) and the University of Siena.

He said their study focused on the direct non-CO2 emissions released from live breeding animals and that indirect CO2 emissions embedded in the life cycle of meat products were not included.