In November 2025, the United Nations will hold its 30th Conference of Parties on climate change – COP30. The conference is an annual meeting of the world’s governments to discuss the major priorities for mitigating climate change. While previous COPs have led to major agreements on global emissions targets, the conference is often criticized for being held in countries with a large political stake in emissions-intensive industries.

• In 2023, COP28 was hosted in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s largest oil producing countries. The event attracted a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists, four times more than the previous year.
• In 2024, COP29 was hosted in Azerbaijan, a country in which fossil fuels account for nearly half of GDP and 92.5% of export revenues. The event was opened by Azerbaijan’s President declaring oil and gas to be “a gift from God”, and the final text did not renew the previous year’s call to phase out fossil fuels or reduce subsidies.
• In 2025, COP30 will be hosted in Brazil – the world’s largest exporter of meat.

This is important because livestock systems are a significant driver of climate change, and livestock sector lobbyists will undoubtedly be ready to defend their industry at COP30. Indeed, livestock lobbyists have already been engaging with the United Nations’ organisations on this issue. 

At COP28 in 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organisation released its controversial ‘Pathways Towards Lower Emissions’ report. The report argued that meat reduction would account for very little of the climate mitigation potential for the livestock sector. 

At COP29 in 2024, there was very little discussion about reducing livestock. The livestock discussion that took place centred on the talking points in the Pathway’s report, including animal health, genetics, feed, and livestock in developing countries – but not meat reduction.

At COP30 in 2025, there is no doubt that livestock industry lobbyists will appeal to the 2023 FAO Pathways Towards Lower Emissions report. This is despite the fact that the report “seriously distorts” the evidence, according to the very scientists whose work forms the backbone of the report.Over 100 organisations and scientists are calling for the report to be retracted due to undue industry influence. 

Furthermore, the FAO’s report has a fundamental flaw: it assumes that there will be very little diet change in the future. It then uses this assumption as the basis of its analysis of how much mitigation potential will come from dietary change.

You might need to read that twice, because its logic is so silly. It is obviously trivial to say that a very low percentage of emissions reduction will come from diet change if you start by assuming that there will be very little diet change.

If my wife expressed concern that we were spending too much money on single malt whisky, I might reassure her by saying that changes in single malt whisky consumption would only account for a very low percentage of the overall change in our household spending in the next year. However, this might well become less reassuring if she discovered that this analysis was underpinned by the assumption that I would continue to consume unsustainably high amounts of single malt whisky. At that stage, it would seem perfectly reasonable for her to ask, “Might you not try consuming less single malt whisky?”

The FAO’s 2023 Pathways Towards Lower Emissions report assumes that significant meat reduction is not possible, and uses that as the basis to argue that efficiency improvements to livestock can meet our climate goals instead. Here, we argue that meat reduction is not only possible, but that it is necessary, and that it is not mutually exclusive with efficiency improvements in any case.

The flawed analysis in the FAO’s report is based on the incorrect assumption that significant reduction in meat consumption is not possible. In fact, we can point to a number of ways that meat consumption could be significantly reduced using public policy, technological development, and simple behavioural nudges:

1. Mandatory labels to ensure consumers have accurate information about the animal welfare, health, and environmental impacts of meat would be likely to reduce consumption.
2. Having governments implement and incentivise simple, proven behavioural nudges in food choice settings. Effective nudges include plant-based defaults, majority plant-based menus, and appealing descriptions for plant-based options.
3. Continuing to develop alternative proteins that compete with animal products in terms of taste and price will lead to further displacement of animal products by alternatives, reducing overall meat consumption.
4. Having meat producers pay for their negative externalities including emissions and public health risks would increase the cost of meat, which would decrease consumption.

Despite the claims in the FAO’s Pathways report, there are numerous impactful and tractable ways to reduce meat consumption just waiting to be adopted by well-informed governments.

Meat reduction is not only possible – it is necessary to achieve our climate goals. A 2020 paper published in Science found that, without significant changes to our food system including significant meat reduction, we are extremely unlikely to limit global warming to 2°C.

Much has been made of the FAO’s revision of the direct emissions attributable to the livestock sector from 18% down to 12%. Although the arguments underpinning this revision are questionable, this misses the broader point that much of the livestock sector’s emissions are indirect. This is not just a discussion about the methane that comes out of farmed animals – it’s about the forests that are being cut down to feed them.

Indeed, livestock systems are a major driver of deforestation, accounting for 77% of all deforestation. Direct emissions from livestock are only a small part of the story. A larger problem with livestock systems is that they require so much land that they limit the land we have for carbon sequestration and storage. Pasture-raised beef, for example, requires 420m2 of land per kg, meaning that a single quarter pounder requires enough land to park three Ford F150s.

Livestock are inherently inefficient compared to crops because they occupy a higher place on the trophic chain. That means it is inevitable that significant caloric energy is wasted when livestock turn crops into animal products.

Finally, the livestock production efficiency improvements proposed in the FAO’s Pathways report and elsewhere are not mutually exclusive with meat reduction. 

Animal products are the most emissions-intensive foods by a wide margin. Even if efficiency improvements cut their emissions in half, animal products would still be the most emissions-intensive foods. The inescapable conclusion is that consuming fewer of them will always be necessary to mitigate emissions.

At this stage, technologies to improve the emissions efficiency of livestock production may also be a necessary part of emissions mitigation for the livestock sector. But these technologies on their own are not enough, and it is irresponsible for industry lobbyists to suggest that they will be.

Significant reductions in meat consumption are not only possible, but are necessary to meet our climate goals. COP30 in Brazil in 2025 will be a key junction in the discourse on climate and food systems, and we must not allow the conversation to be misled by “evidence” based on fundamental flaws.