Climate Impacts of Cultured Meat and Beef Cattle

Abstract

Improved greenhouse gas (GHG) emission efficiency of production has been proposed as one of the biggest potential advantages of cultured meat over conventional livestock production systems. Comparisons with beef are typically highlighted, as it is a highly emissions intensive food product. In this study we present a more rigorous comparison of the potential climate impacts of cultured meat and cattle production than has previously been made. Warming impacts are evaluated using a simple climate model that simulates the different behaviours of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), rather than relying on carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) metrics. We compare the temperature impact of beef cattle and cultured meat production at all times to 1000 years in the future, using four synthetic meat GHG footprints currently available in the literature and three different beef production systems studied in an earlier climate modelling paper. Cattle systems are associated with the production of all three GHGs above, including significant emissions of CH4, while cultured meat emissions are almost entirely CO2 from energy generation. Under continuous high global consumption, cultured meat results in less warming than cattle initially, but this gap narrows in the long term and in some cases cattle production causes far less warming, as CH4 emissions do not accumulate, unlike CO2. We then model a decline in meat consumption to more sustainable levels following high consumption, and show that although cattle systems generally result in greater peak warming than cultured meat, the warming effect declines and stabilises under the new emission rates of cattle systems, while the CO2 based warming from cultured meat persists and accumulates even under reduced consumption, again overtaking cattle production in some scenarios. We conclude that cultured meat is not prima facie climatically superior to cattle production; its relative impact instead depends on the availability of decarbonised energy generation and the specific production systems that are realised.

We Can’t Keep Meating Like This: Attitudes towards Vegetarian and Vegan Diets in the United Kingdom

“…In particular, scientists in academia and industry are working to further the development of cultured meat, which can be grown from animal cells rather than by rearing animals [78]. Cultured meat production does not need to harm animals and potentially has a lower environmental footprint than conventional meat [79]. Therefore, producing meat in this way could allow consumers to continue enjoying the taste and texture of animal meat whilst circumventing many of the ethical and environmental concerns around meat production.…”

Scaffolds for 3D Cell Culture and Cellular Agriculture Applications Derived From Non-animal Sources

“…Furthermore, these materials have been modified, either as microspheres or bulk, to possess the porosity necessary for diffusion of nutrients through dynamic or static bioreactors (Oh et al, 2009;Wu et al, 2011;García Cruz et al, 2012;Varley et al, 2017;Huang et al, 2018;Specht et al, 2018). In order to scale an animal-free product with similarities to that of native animal tissue, the need for fetal bovine serum, costeffective engineering processes, antibiotic dependence, scaffold development, and cell line(immortalized vs. primary and cell co-culture) needs to be addressed (Specht et al, 2018;Stephens et al, 2018;Lynch and Pierrehumbert, 2019). It's currently believed that scaffolding will play a crucial role in the scalability of cultured meat.…”

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“…Generally speaking, the production of cultured meat is presented as environmentally friendly, because it is supposed to produce less GHG (which is a matter of controversy), consume less water and use less land (this point being obvious) in comparison to conventional meat production (13,24,25), from ruminants particularly. However, this type of comparison is incomplete and sometimes biased or at least, partial as discussed below.…”

“…In a recent study, Lynch et al (24) concluded that global warming will be less with cultured meat than with cattle initially, but not in the long term because CH 4 does not accumulate as so long in the atmosphere unlike CO 2 . In some cases, cattle systems are characterized by a greater peak warming compared to in vitro meat.…”