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Where livestock emissions come from
Source: UN Food and Agriculture Organization — livestock emissions model (GLEAM) and the 2024 State of Food and Agriculture report
Climate cost per kilo of food: 8 foods compared
Source: Poore and Nemecek 2018 — the largest food-system meta-analysis ever published, in Science. Covers 38,700 farms in 119 countries and roughly 90% of the world's calories and protein.
Beef is the long red bar; tofu and beans are the short green bars. Sorted by kilograms of CO₂-equivalent emissions per kilogram of food, counting the whole supply chain: land use, farming, feed, processing, transport, retail and packaging (global averages from Poore and Nemecek 2018).
Livestock emissions by country
Source: FAOSTAT, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s statistics database (on-farm livestock emissions)
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Who emits most — by total, and by person
Source: FAOSTAT, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s statistics database (on-farm livestock emissions)
Two ways of asking the same question. By total answers where is the mass of the problem — China, the United States, India, Brazil. By person answers whose lifestyle is most carbon-intensive — New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Ireland. Bar color shows Global Methane Pledge status: green countries signed, orange countries did not.
By total emissions
Billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per year
By emissions per person
Tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per person per year
Atmospheric methane — agriculture is about 40% of the human-caused total
Live signal: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Global Monitoring Laboratory atmospheric methane trend, pulled daily through the Permafrost and Methane Tracker (a sibling dashboard in this portfolio)
Each vertical stripe is one month, from 1983 on the left to today on the right. The colour of each stripe shows the atmospheric methane level that month — teal at the cool end shifting to deep red at the warm end.
What drives this
- Crop stress →Feed crops, pasture drought, and herd stress shape livestock supply chains.
- Methane in the air →Atmospheric methane from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the live signal this page borrows.
- Deforestation →Pasture and feed expansion are major land-use pressure points.
What this drives
- Climate tipping risk →Methane and land-use emissions add near-term warming pressure.
- Ocean heat →Extra greenhouse gases ultimately load more heat into the ocean.
Global Methane Pledge coverage
Source: Global Methane Pledge — official signatory list maintained by the United States and European Union
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Why studies give different numbers
How we know this
- Live signal: Global atmospheric methane concentration, in parts per billion, from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Global Monitoring Laboratory — read daily through the Permafrost and Methane Tracker, a sibling dashboard in this portfolio. This is a measure of the whole atmospheric methane budget, not a livestock-only meter; agriculture is roughly 40% of human-caused methane (Global Methane Budget 2000–2020, from the Global Carbon Project).
- Reference statistics: Sector shares, country totals, and per-food footprints come from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's livestock emissions model (GLEAM, 2023 update) and its 2013 livestock report; Xu and colleagues 2021 in Nature Food; FAOSTAT for the country figures; and Poore and Nemecek 2018 in Science. Country figures are built by a script from the published FAOSTAT, World Bank and Our World in Data files; the headline figures are refreshed after each new report.
- Headline range (11–20%): Reflects honest methodological choices — whether to count direct livestock emissions only, life-cycle emissions including feed and processing, or also the opportunity cost of using pasture and feed land for livestock instead of letting it return to natural ecosystem. Not measurement error.
- Methane Pledge map: Green = joined the Global Methane Pledge; orange = has not joined. Status for every country comes from the pledge's official participant list (159 countries plus the European Union, checked October 2026). Several of the largest methane emitters, including China, India, Russia and Iran, have not joined.
- Location: The dashboard opens on a worldwide view; pick a country from the selector. It never detects your location.
- Curated country profiles: 31 countries have a per-person meat figure, the livestock share of national emissions, Methane Pledge status, and a one-sentence "why this country matters" note. Meat eaten per person from Our World in Data (FAO food balance sheets); livestock share of national emissions from FAOSTAT (on-farm livestock emissions as a share of all emissions excluding land use and forests).
- Primary data sources: UN Food and Agriculture Organization — livestock emissions model (GLEAM) · US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — Global Monitoring Laboratory methane trend · Our World in Data — meat production and consumption · How this page is built