Beef: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
44.98 kgCO2e per kg
Source: The Big Climate Database (CONCITO, Denmark), 1.2 (revision 1). Factor set bcd-1.2-r1.
Beef has one of the highest carbon footprints of any food. The figure below — for raw beef mince, from Denmark's official Big Climate Database (CONCITO) — reflects methane from cattle digestion, feed production and land use, which together dwarf the processing and transport stages.
The gap to other proteins is the headline: per kilogram, beef's footprint is several times chicken's and an order of magnitude above pulses. Swapping even some beef meals is one of the highest-impact dietary changes available, which is why our food calculator shows the per-line difference explicitly.
Worked example
One 500 g pack of beef mince: 0.5 × 44.98 = 22.5 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Why is beef's carbon footprint so high?
- Cattle emit methane during digestion — a potent greenhouse gas — and require large amounts of feed and land. These biological emissions, not transport, dominate beef's footprint.
- Does local beef have a lower footprint?
- Not meaningfully: transport is a small slice of beef's total footprint. Production method matters far more than distance travelled.