By 2050, Scotland could reduce its meat intake by 35%, just by tweaking the diets of its highest meat consumers, a new study has found. This more targeted approach, instead of a country-wide change, was found to not only curb emissions but also cut health problems, reducing individual cases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by tens of thousands.
Of all UK countries, Scotland stands out because emissions from food consumption exceed those of the agricultural sector overall. This strikingly large footprint is probably due to Scotland’s heavy reliance on food imports, and it was the jumping off point for the scientists’ work.
To investigate, they looked at Scotland’s dietary intake, then used datasets to track the environmental impact of those diets, ranging from greenhouse gas emissions to water use. With this information in place, they compared 33 ways to achieve the recommendations of the UK Climate Change Committee, a body suggesting that UK countries reduce meat and dairy consumption by 20% by 2030, rising to 35% by 2050, in order to reach its climate goals.
The explored measures ranged from reducing all types of meat consumption across the whole Scottish population, to limiting just red meat consumption only in some groups, and reducing dairy intake alone. The measures also looked at replacing animal proteins with alternatives like beans, eggs, and plant-based dairy alternatives.
Of the 33 possible pathways, the one that really stood out involved reducing meat consumption only amongst Scotland’s biggest meat consumers—those consuming more than 70 grams of red meat per day. This measure proposed a reasonable change: that individuals limit only their red meat intake to 31g per person per day, and cut dairy intake by 20%, to achieve the 2050 goal. This involved reducing animal protein without replacing it with alternatives, as this population is already consuming more protein than healthy diets require.
With these targeted dietary changes, Scotland could bring down individual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.06 kg of CO2-equivalent per day, which made it the single most effective dietary pathway to reducing carbon footprints. The health benefits were also striking: over 10 years it would reduce cases of diabetes and cardiovascular disease by almost 60,000 and 20,000 respectively. This one dietary change would also reduce deaths over this period by an estimated 2,240. Diets would also be cheaper, by roughly £0.41 per day.
While the targeted population measure was the most effective all-round, other approaches achieved large environmental and health gains, too. All accomplished significant net reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Across the board, meat consumption was the biggest driver of environmental impact, and therefore where the biggest opportunities lay to cut emissions down. Meat consumption could invariably be replaced by other proteins with no impact on nutritional values, and most of the alternative 33 diets were cheaper than the standard diet—except for one where red meat was replaced by oily fish and cost a little more per day.
Nevertheless, identifying a single most effective measure to bring down Scotland’s meat consumption can be a helpful starting point for policymakers. On this note, the study shares two further clues: that Scotland’s highest meat consumers tend to eat more traditional beef-based dishes and meat sandwiches. When it comes to shifting the nation’s dietary footprint, these could be “an effective place to start,” the researchers write.
Kennedy et. al. “Reduced meat and dairy consumption improves health, environmental and most nutritional outcomes without increasing diet costs among Scottish adults.” Nature Food. 2026.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
