How livestock emissions are counted

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Raising animals for food produces somewhere between 11 and 20% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, roughly as much as all the world’s cars, trucks, planes and ships. The range is wide because studies count different things, not because anyone doubts that cattle produce methane.

Food by food, the differences are much larger. A kilogram of beef from a beef herd comes with about 100 kilograms of greenhouse gases over its supply chain; a kilogram of tofu, about 3; a kilogram of beans or other pulses, under 2.

Why the estimates range from 11 to 20%

Three well-known estimates set the range:

• 14.5% is the most quoted figure. It comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2013: 7.1 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent a year, for the year 2005, counting the whole livestock supply chain from feed to processing.
• About 11–12% is FAO’s newer estimate, from an updated version of the same model published in 2023: 6.2 billion tonnes for the year 2015.
• About 20% comes from Xu and colleagues (2021), who found that animal-based foods, including the crops grown to feed animals and the land cleared for them, make up 57% of all food-production emissions.

The differences come down to boundaries. Is land cleared for pasture and feed counted? Are processing, transport and retail? How much warming is methane credited with, given that it is far more potent than carbon dioxide but breaks down within a few decades? Which year’s global total is the share taken from? Each choice moves the answer by a few percentage points.

Where livestock emissions come from

The only published split of the whole supply chain is FAO’s 2013 assessment. Growing and processing feed, including clearing land for pasture and feed crops, makes up about 45%. Methane from the digestion of cattle, sheep and goats (“enteric fermentation”) makes up about 39%. Manure storage and processing adds about 10%, and processing and transporting the products about 6%.

The food comparison

The per-kilogram bars come from Poore and Nemecek (2018), who combined data from about 38,000 farms producing 40 kinds of food around the world. Each bar is the global average for the whole supply chain: land use, farming, feed, processing, transport, retail and packaging. The same food can have a very different footprint on different farms, but the study found that even the lowest-impact animal products usually have a larger footprint than plant-based alternatives.

Beef and lamb are highest because cattle and sheep produce methane as they digest, eat a lot of feed for each kilogram of meat, and often need land that was once forest.

How current each part is

• Sector share and total tonnage: from the reports above, for the years 2005 and 2015. We update them by hand when a new assessment is published.
• Food footprints: Poore and Nemecek (2018), with data for around 2010.
• Country figures: from FAOSTAT, the FAO’s statistics database, for 2023: on-farm livestock emissions (digestion and manure) per country, which add up to 4.3 billion tonnes worldwide. That is less than the 6.2 billion tonnes above because it leaves out feed crops, land clearing and processing. Built by a script from the published files and refreshed when FAOSTAT publishes a new year.
• Methane in the atmosphere: NOAA’s global monthly average, checked every night.
• Global Methane Pledge: the list of participants, updated by hand. As of October 2026 it has 159 countries plus the European Commission.

What the dashboard can’t tell you

The methane chart is not a livestock meter. Agriculture causes about 40% of human-caused methane emissions, but wetlands, fossil fuels, landfills and fires also add methane to the air, and the recent rise has more than one cause. The chart shows whether methane in the atmosphere is still rising, not whether livestock emissions are.

The pledge map shows commitments, not results. Countries that joined promised to help cut global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Joining does not mean a country is on track, and countries outside the pledge can still have methane policies.

The food bars are global averages. They are not a calculator for a particular steak or a particular block of tofu, and nothing here is dietary advice.

Further reading

• FAO (2023), Pathways towards lower emissions: the updated livestock estimate (6.2 billion tonnes for 2015) and options to reduce it. doi.org/10.4060/cc9029en
• Gerber et al. (2013), FAO, Tackling climate change through livestock: the source of the 14.5% figure and the supply-chain split. fao.org/4/i3437e
• Xu et al. (2021), Nature Food: greenhouse-gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods. doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00358-x
• Poore & Nemecek (2018), Science: the environmental impacts of 40 foods from about 38,000 farms. doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216
• Saunois et al. (2025), Earth System Science Data: the Global Methane Budget 2000–2020, the source of agriculture’s share of methane. doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-1873-2025
• Our World in Data: readable charts of food footprints, built on Poore and Nemecek. ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
• NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory: global atmospheric methane measurements. gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends_ch4

Credits

The numbers here come from FAO’s livestock modelling, Xu and colleagues, Poore and Nemecek, FAOSTAT, the Global Carbon Project’s methane budget and NOAA’s atmospheric measurements. This dashboard collects and presents their work.