Food systems are responsible for around one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – and beef has the largest carbon footprint of any food.
Moving diets away from beef and other red meat has become increasingly seen as an important part of mitigating food-related emissions.
But such changes can have unintended consequences, especially for countries that rely heavily on beef production and exports.
In our new study, published in Ecological Economics, we examine the impacts of a gradual reduction in Brazil’s beef consumption on the country’s emissions and economy.
Using an economic model, we find that reducing the average person’s beef intake in line with health recommendations could make up as much as a third of the world’s potential mitigation from dietary changes (according to the UN) – with little impact on Brazil’s overall economy.
Mitigation potential
Research shows that shifts toward plant-based diets can contribute to both mitigating climate change and improving human health.
Meat and animal-derived food production emits more greenhouse gases and consumes more water and land resources than plant-based food production.
Animal-derived food production also results in calorific loss down the food chain. The amount of calories contained in an animal that humans consume is much lower than the sum of the calories of that animal’s food.
For example, of every 100 calories used for sustenance and growth in animals, humans receive between 17 and 30 calories from meat consumption. This loss during the process of raising, processing and consuming animals is due to various factors, including inefficiencies in digestive processes and the physical activity of the animals themselves.
According to the 2019 special report on climate change and land from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), dietary shifts have the potential to mitigate up to 8bn tonnes of CO2-equivalents (GtCO2e) around the world each year by 2050.
In Brazil, approximately 60% of the country’s annual emissions stem from land-use change and agriculture. It is one of the largest beef producers in the world.
In addition, global demand for beef is directly linked to deforestation in the Amazon as forests are cleared to make space for rearing cattle. It is also of global concern, due to the importance of the Amazon as a carbon sink.
Reducing beef consumption
Reducing red meat consumption is crucial not only for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, but also for improving public health.
Studies have shown that excessive meat consumption can lead to higher rates of cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer. According to research from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research, the ideal limit for red meat – that is, beef, pork, lamb and goat – consumption is up to 300 grams per week per person.
Brazil – along with the US, Australia and Argentina – surpasses this recommended average per-capita meat consumption. Annual beef consumption in Brazil is more than 460 grams per week, according to data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Thus, in our study, we set out to reach the recommended per-capita average beef consumption by 2050 – a reduction in consumption of 40%.
We test two scenarios to reduce consumption.
First, we look at relative price changes. We consider a situation where taxes on beef are raised over time from the 2015 average rate of around 8% to approximately 40% in 2050. (Existing taxes on beef in Brazil vary, with specific rates set at the state level.) In a related scenario, we consider what would happen if the funds from such a tax were put towards subsidies for lower-carbon foods.
Second, we look at changing consumer preferences. This could require formal interventions, such as information campaigns and the consideration of culture, emotions and morality. However, it could also occur naturally. Our model does not consider the drivers of the change, but recognises that such a change would occur slowly.
Although there is some movement towards reduced meat consumption due to changing consumer preferences, it remains relatively limited and more concentrated in developed countries. Reasons for this shift in preferences may include higher levels of education and income.
However, in Brazil, meat is viewed as a culturally essential food. In addition, regional preferences differ – for example, there is typically a high beef consumption in the northern region of Brazil, where the Amazon is located.
Despite the international attention linking excessive beef consumption to climate change and Amazon deforestation in Brazil, it has had minimal impact on Brazilian dietary preferences.
Modelling impacts
Our study analyses the impacts of a reduction in beef consumption on Brazil’s domestic market.
We focus on impacts on the country’s economy as a whole, effects on individual sectors such as agriculture and industry, regional impacts and deforestation reduction in the Amazonia and Matopiba regions. Matopiba is a region in the Cerrado, a savannah biome where agriculture has advanced in the last three decades.
The map below shows how Brazil is divided between the Amazon (green), the Matopiba region (orange) and the rest of the country (blue).
MAP
We conduct a set of simulations using an economic model for the two regions. In our model, different groups – such as consumers and firms, including investors, agricultural firms, industries and food service – are assumed to make the best decisions based on what they prefer and what they can afford. For firms, the “best decisions” are the ones that minimise their costs, while consumers seek to maximise their “utility”, or satisfaction.
This model represents how the economy works by looking at how people and businesses behave, how they interact in markets, and when the market will reach equilibrium – that is, when supply and demand are balanced.
We use the model to analyse the effects of policies and shocks on different sectors, regions and groups. We present our results as deviations from a baseline trajectory that assumes constant per-capita beef consumption until 2050, with overall consumption growing at the same rate as the Brazilian population.
It is essential to note that the deforestation reduction captured in the model is related to agricultural activity, not to deforestation associated with illegal logging or land grabbing. However, beef and other agriculture drives around 90% of deforestation in Brazil currently, so this is unlikely to significantly change our results.
The latter has various motivations and can be more effectively inhibited through increased environmental monitoring, land demarcation and other mechanisms developed and applied over the last two decades.
Deforestation impacts
We find that a 40% reduction in beef consumption from 2022 to 2050 would help prevent deforestation of approximately 65,000 square kilometres – larger than the area of Sri Lanka.
It also has the potential to mitigate up to 2.8GtCO2e per year, which is one-third of the total mitigation potential from changing diets presented in the IPCC’s special report on land.
The charts below show the amount of avoided deforestation for the Amazon and Matopiba regions relative to the baseline scenario.
Grey and light green indicate lower amounts of avoided deforestation and dark green indicates the highest amounts. The top, middle and bottom maps show reduced beef consumption through changing consumer preferences, a beef tax and a beef tax with subsidies for other foods, respectively.
In addition to deforestation, we considered the impacts that these shifts would have on Brazil’s economy.
Our findings suggest that dietary shifts due to changes in preferences would have virtually no impact on Brazilian GDP in 2050, reducing it by 0.03% – largely due to a slight decrease in investment.
Adjusting diets through an increase in beef taxes would lead to overall cost increases, resulting in decreases in exports and GDP. We find that GDP would decline by 0.64% in this scenario, with exports decreasing by 1.5%.
However, in the scenario where the beef tax revenue is applied to other foods as subsidies, the national GDP declines by only 0.18%, despite similar decreases in exports.
In all scenarios, we find that the economic impacts would differ from one area of the country to the next. In particular, they would affect regions most dependent on the cattle and beef sector, which are also the most directly affected by the proposed taxation policies. In the beef tax scenario without subsidies, two northern states experience declines in GDP of 3% or higher.
Although Brazilians reducing their beef consumption would bring environmental and health benefits to the country, emissions mitigation cannot be solely Brazil’s responsibility. We observe that the reduction in beef consumption through preference changes leads to a negative effect on the domestic price of beef.
This decrease in domestic prices would, in turn, favour Brazilian beef exports, resulting in less mitigation and a smaller reduction in deforestation. Therefore, it is crucial for this change in habit to be followed by other economies worldwide – notably, those that heavily import Brazilian beef, including China, the US and EU.
The post Guest post: How shifting diets away from beef could cut Brazil’s emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How shifting diets away from beef could cut Brazil’s emissions
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.