Note from the VRG Research Director
Carbon Footprints vs. Water Footprints
If you're vegan for the environment, should water footprints or carbon footprints of food matter more to you? Almost all large studies and meta-analyses compiling results of several studies conclude that vegan diets have the smallest overall footprint of all diets. The reason is that it takes much more water and fossil fuels to produce meat and dairy compared to plants. Additionally, the methane and nitrous oxide generated from animal agriculture supercharge climate breakdown.
However, there are a few vegan foods—such as almonds, coffee, and olive oil—that have high water footprints. And rice's carbon footprint is much higher than those of other grains (and almost as high as that of chicken eggs) because of the methane produced from growing rice. Although in these cases, the water usage and carbon emissions are small compared to those produced by meat and dairy production, they are still significantly more than those of other plant foods.
So, what's a vegan to do? If you're trying to live more sustainably, it's important to consider both the water and the carbon footprints of food. In cases where a particular vegan food has an extremely high water footprint or carbon footprint, you may choose other options whose footprint is not as high. Fortunately, as a vegan, you have plenty of other options.
However, even if you decide to stop eating certain vegan foods because of their heavy water or carbon footprints, you don't need to count up the footprints of every food on your plate at every meal. Almost all studies show that vegans' personal food footprints are already the lowest of all. Vegetarians have smaller food footprints than meat eaters do, although not as low as vegans have in most cases.
Whatever you choose to do in the name of living lightly on the Earth, remember that there's more to sustainable food than just water and carbon footprints. It would be helpful to everyone striving to adopt a sustainable diet if there were tables of information listing the environmental footprints of foods. This metric, in theory, would contain not only water usage and carbon emissions associated with foods. It would also include, for example, the effects of a food's production in relation to: land use, deforestation, eutrophication potential, acidification potential, fossil resource use, aquifer depletion, air pollution, and biodiversity.
The VRG has already provided detailed information on the water and carbon footprints of many foods in several of our earlier publications, such as our water pollution brochure, vegan burrito infographic, and carbon footprints of vegan pizza.
Remember that the notion of a personal carbon footprint was created by the fossil fuel industry as a marketing tactic to shift the focus away from their products as causing climate breakdown and placing responsibility on individual people. However, although you didn't cause the problem as an individual through your food choices, this doesn't mean you should disregard the effect of your food on the environment and eat whatever you want. It's always best to limit your consumption of unsustainable foods if possible—for health, environmental, and ethical reasons. One person's dietary choice is not going to solve the planetary environmental crisis. However, one person's food preferences can have effects, which, when multiplied by millions of people, could lead to system change. To see my complete editorial, see vrg.org/blog/2023/11/24/carbon-footprints-vs-water-footprints-of-vegan-foods-which-is-more-important
Jeanne Yacoubou, MS
Research Director of The Vegetarian Resource Group
