Lamb: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
38.14 kgCO2e per kg
Source: The Big Climate Database (CONCITO, Denmark), 1.2 (revision 1). Factor set bcd-1.2-r1.
Lamb sits in the top tier of The Big Climate Database, behind beef and ahead of everything that is not a ruminant. The live figure is below. Sheep and cattle share the mechanism that puts them both up there: they are ruminants, so they emit methane from digestion, and methane dominates a ruminant footprint in a way it never does for a pig, a bird or a plant.
Grazing land use compounds it. Sheep are farmed on land that produces relatively little meat per hectare, and the database counts the land's carbon cost alongside the animal's. That is why swapping either red meat for a non-ruminant protein moves a weekly shop further than any other single substitution available to a household.
Worked example
A 1.5 kg leg of lamb for a Sunday roast: 1.5 × 38.14 = 57.2 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Is lamb worse than beef?
- Not in The Big Climate Database — beef's average sits above lamb's, and so does the beef mince cut our beef page uses. The two are close by the standards of the rest of the table, and both are far above every non-ruminant meat.
- Does grass-fed lamb have a lower footprint?
- The database publishes one average figure for lamb rather than splitting by system, so we cannot show a grass-fed number without leaving the source. Farming system matters, but the methane from digestion — the largest single component — is present either way.