It’s pretty much impossible to live a life free of environmental harm. The cleanest energy relies on mining. Critical medical supplies produce plastic waste. Even organic foods are typically grown with pesticides.
But there is one thing you could do immediately that would help the planet a heck of a lot: eat less beef.
I know, I know; for most omnivores, beef is hard to give up. The cheeseburger is one of the only truly American foods, and meat-free alternatives are not yet perfect mimics (though, in taste, some plant-based products come extremely close).
Yet, the data is incredibly clear and incredibly compelling: Of all the foods we produce on Earth, beef is the No. 1 destroyer of forests, and especially rainforests. Raising cattle for meat not only endangers wildlife but fuels climate change — in a big way.
That’s one takeaway of a large-scale analysis of global deforestation published today in Nature Food. The study authors explored where around the world trees have disappeared over the last two decades and then linked that loss to dozens of different commodities grown on land, from cattle and corn to coffee and cacao.
The results — captured in the chart above — reveal that beef has driven about 120 million acres of forest destruction globally between 2001 and 2022, an area larger than the state of California. And most of that loss was in the tropics, the analysis shows, in places like the Amazon rainforest that are teeming with wildlife.
Other commodities, like oil palm and soy, also replaced millions of acres of tropical forest in the past two decades, the analysis shows. Manufacturers use palm oil — the most widely produced vegetable oil in the world — to make everything from peanut butter to mascara. Much of the world’s soy beans, meanwhile, are not bound to become tofu but are, in fact, fed to farm animals like chickens and pigs.
One surprising result from the study is that many staple foods, like maize, rice, and cassava — commodities that tend to draw far more attention for their environmental impact — have a larger deforestation footprint than cocoa or coffee. Global risk assessments tend to overlook those staples, perhaps because they’re less commonly exported to wealthy economies, according to Chandrakant Singh, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology. The new study may, however, be underestimating the impact of chocolate and coffee farms, said Liz Goldman, co-director of the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch at World Resources Institute, a nonprofit environmental group.
“The analysis is strong,” said Goldman, who was not involved in the new study but published a similar analysis in 2022. “The important thing to keep in mind is that there are some data limitations coming through in the results.” It’s still challenging for researchers to detect the expansion of cocoa or coffee farms, Goldman said. Scientists typically rely on satellite imagery to monitor crops, but commodities like cocoa and coffee often grow among naturally occurring trees and can look, in a satellite analysis, like natural forest — even though they typically have less biodiversity.
Beyond tallying acres of razed forest, the new paper also estimated how much carbon emissions that deforestation produced. Farmers and ranchers often clear trees by burning them, which releases the carbon stored in the trunks and branches back into the atmosphere.
Beef, once again, came in way ahead. The analysis suggested that raising cattle for meat created more than 20,000 megatons (or million metric tons) of carbon dioxide just in the past two decades through its impact on forests alone. That’s equivalent to more than three times the yearly emissions of the US. And it doesn’t include the greenhouse gas emissions that stem from cow burps or the crops grown to feed them.
The good news here is that, without question, consumers can help rainforests by eating less beef — even if they don’t live in the tropics. The US, for example, still imports a lot of cattle meat from Brazil, where cows are known to graze on cleared Amazon jungle. Singh hopes that his new study motivates consumers to pay more attention to where their food is coming from.
But, at least for now, global demand for beef is continuing to grow, as rising wealth in countries like China makes beef more accessible.
The assumption among many people who work with forest data is that “more information will yield better outcomes,” Goldman, of Global Forest Watch, told Vox. “But it seems like that’s not the case here, unfortunately. I’m not sure what it will take to change behavior around this.”
Disclosure: Benji Jones, this story’s author, worked at Global Forest Watch as a research analyst from 2013 to 2015.
