Nature Climate Change: Reducing climate change impacts from the global food system through diet shifts
Nature Climate Change (2024) Reducing climate change impacts from the global food system through diet shifts
This paper evaluates the unequal distribution of dietary emissions from 140 food products in 139 countries or areas and models the changes in emissions of global diet shifts. Consumers with higher expenditures generally cause more dietary emissions due to higher red meat and dairy intake. Such inequality is more pronounced in low-income countries. The present global annual dietary emissions would fall by 17% with the worldwide adoption of the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, primarily attributed to shifts from red meat to legumes and nuts as principal protein sources.