Prawns: carbon footprint per kg
Live factor value
10.07 kgCO2e per kg
Source: The Big Climate Database (CONCITO, Denmark), 1.2 (revision 1). Factor set bcd-1.2-r1.
Farmed prawns carry a far higher footprint than most people assume of seafood — the live figure is below, and it sits at the top of the seafood range alongside canned cod liver, above every meat in this database except the ruminants. Warm-water prawn ponds are energy-hungry to aerate and heat, the feed conversion is poor, and many ponds were built on cleared coastal wetland whose stored carbon is counted against the harvest.
It is the clearest case in the database of a food whose reputation and its number point in opposite directions. Seafood is widely treated as the light option on a menu; this particular seafood is not, and the gap between farmed prawns and the wild-caught and lower-intensity species elsewhere in the table is one of the widest within a single food category.
Worked example
A 200 g bag of frozen prawns: 0.2 × 10.07 = 2 kgCO2e.
Measure your own with the free food calculator.
Frequently asked questions
- Are wild-caught prawns lower-carbon than farmed?
- This page uses the aquaculture figure the database publishes. Wild capture avoids the pond conversion and aeration terms but adds fuel-intensive trawling, so the answer depends on the fishery rather than following a simple rule.
- Is all seafood high-carbon?
- No — prawns are at the top end. Farmed and wild fin fish generally sit far lower, and the spread across seafood is wider than the spread across most meat categories.