Cutting meat and dairy could slash your carbon footprint by nearly half

Swapping meat and dairy for plant-based alternatives could reduce your annual carbon footprint by up to 40%. With meat and dairy contributing 8% of total Dutch emissions, small dietary changes can make a big climate impact.

Category	Annual CO₂eq per Person	Daily CO₂eq per Person	Key Insight
Meat	415 kg	1.14 kg	Beef has the highest emissions
Dairy (incl. cheese)	305 kg	N/A	Consumed in larger quantities than meat
Meat substitutes	225 kg	N/A	46% reduction compared to meat
Total Dutch emissions	9,300 kg	N/A	Meat & dairy = 8% of total emissions
Methane impact	N/A	N/A	Up to 30x stronger warming effect than CO₂

The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) provides climate data and research to inform government policy and public awareness. This report highlights the environmental impact of food consumption, a key factor in national climate strategies.

The summary and analysis above were generated by European AI

Share this article

Unfiltered ☕

Openrijk brings government news unfiltered to you. But that does cost us the necessary caffeine.

Buy us a coffee ❤️ Openrijk

Read the full translated article below

Less meat and dairy: what does that do to our emissions?

March 4, 2026

Our consumption of meat and dairy causes greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to current warming, which is why there is increasingly more attention for alternatives with a lower climate impact. The campaign Wissel 'ns Wat, which started this week and makes plant-based food more accessible, is a good example of this. What is the impact of our food actually and to what extent can that impact be reduced by replacement with plant-based alternatives?

Meat and dairy

To make this clear, we look at two product groups that play an important role in the Dutch food pattern: meat and dairy products. The climate impact of different greenhouse gases is often expressed in CO₂ equivalents (CO₂eq). This is a measure that converts emissions of, for example, methane and nitrous oxide into the amount of CO₂ with the same warming effect over a period of one hundred years.

Meat has a greater climate impact than dairy

Data from the RIVM show the climate impact of the consumption of different food groups in the Netherlands. Thus, the consumption of meat causes an average of 1.14 kg CO₂eq per person per day, which amounts to approximately 415 kg CO₂eq per year. For dairy, including cheese products, there is an annual contribution of 305 kg CO₂eq per person.

Although dairy products are consumed in much larger quantities in the Netherlands than meat, the consumption of meat products is on average associated with much more emission per kg. For this reason, the climate impact of meat in the Netherlands is greater than that of dairy. However, there are large differences in the climate impact of different types of meat, with beef consumption being the leader in emissions.

Together good for 8 percent of total emissions

The total greenhouse gas emissions per Dutch person in 2023 averaged approximately 9300 kg CO₂eq ( Eurostat, 2026 ). Based on this, meat and dairy products together contribute about 8% to the total average annual emissions per person. That is a significant share for two product groups. The categories meat, dairy, and cheese also have the greatest impact of all product groups (Figure 1).

Why beef is extra relevant

In the category of meat products, something else is also involved in the production of beef. A significant part of the climate impact of cattle comes from methane emissions. Depending on the chosen period, methane is up to seventy times as effective in warming the climate as CO₂. Over a period of one hundred years, this warming effect is about thirty times stronger than that of CO₂. On average, however, methane has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere of ten years, while CO₂ can remain in the atmosphere for centuries.

A reduction in methane emissions can therefore also have a relatively quick effect on limiting warming. Precisely for this reason, climate research often distinguishes between measures that primarily influence warming in the short term, such as reduced methane emissions, and measures that are necessary for a more stable climate in the long term, including limiting CO2 emissions. In recent years, methane emissions have been increasing, among other things due to an increase in large-scale livestock farming. In the Netherlands, agriculture also causes a significant portion of methane emissions.

The importance of a good alternative

The extent to which the replacement of meat and dairy leads to less climate impact depends on the alternative chosen. If we look at the replacement of meat, then the consumption of plant-based meat substitutes is associated with an average emission of approximately 3 kg CO₂eq per kg of product ( RIVM, Environmental impact of foodstuffs, 2024 ). In 2024, the average Dutch person consumed about 75 kg of meat products ( Wageningen Social & Economic Research, 2025 ). If that amount is exchanged for the same amount of meat substitute, it results per person per year in:

Meat substitute: 75 x 3 = 225 kg CO₂eq per year, instead of the 415 kg CO₂eq per year from meat.

The examples in this climate report show that two widely used product groups together make a significant contribution to the average emissions per person. How much the climate impact is reduced by choosing a plant-based alternative also depends on the current food pattern. Especially when beef is replaced, the climate impact can decrease significantly. A reduction in our consumption of meat and dairy therefore measurably contributes to counteracting the current warming.