Recent discussions of healthy and sustainable diets encourage increased consumption of plants and decreased consumption of animal-source foods (ASFs) for both human and environmental health. Seafood is often peripheral in these discussions. This paper examines the relative environmental costs of sourcing key nutrients from different kinds of seafood, other ASFs, and a range of plant-based foods. We linked a nutrient richness index for different foods to life cycle assessments of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the production of these foods to evaluate nutritional benefits relative to this key indicator of environmental impacts. The lowest GHG emissions to meet average nutrient requirement values were found in grains, tubers, roots, seeds, wild-caught small pelagic fish, farmed carp and bivalve shellfish. The highest GHG emissions per nutrient supply are in beef, lamb, wild-caught prawns, farmed crustaceans, and pork. Among ASFs, some fish and shellfish have GHG emissions at least as low as plants and merit inclusion in food systems policymaking for their potential to support a healthy, sustainable diet. However, other aquatic species and production methods deliver nutrition to diets at environmental costs at least as high as land-based meat production. It is important to disaggregate seafood by species and production methodmore »
Contributions of healthier diets and agricultural productivity toward sustainability and climate goals in the United States
Meeting ambitious climate targets will require deploying the full suite of mitigation options, including those that indirectly reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. Healthy diets have sustainability co-benefits by directly reducing livestock emissions as well as indirectly reducing land use emissions. Increased crop productivity could indirectly avoid emissions by reducing cropland area. However, there is disagreement on the sustainability of proposed healthy U.S. diets and a lack of clarity on how long-term sustainability benefits may change in response to shifts in the livestock sector. Here, we explore the GHG emissions impacts of seven scenarios that vary U.S. crop yields and healthier diets in the U.S. and overseas. We also examine how impacts vary across assumptions of future ruminant livestock productivity and ruminant stocking density in the U.S. We employ two complementary land use models—the US FABLE Calculator, an agricultural and forestry sector accounting model with high agricultural commodity representation, and GLOBIOM, a spatially explicit partial equilibrium optimization model for global land use systems. Results suggest that healthier U.S. diets that follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans reduce agricultural and land use greenhouse gas emissions by 25–57% (approx 120–310 MtCO2e/y) and pastureland area by 28–38%. The potential emissions and land sparing benefits more »
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10381735
- Journal Name:
- Sustainability Science
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 1
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- p. 539-556
- ISSN:
- 1862-4065
- Publisher:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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