What if your food had a carbon footprint and human rights label?
Imagine walking into a grocery store where every product has a clear carbon label: 鈥淭he making of a pound of beef produces 130 pounds, or 59 kilograms, of greenhouse gases and could ultimately take 2.3 hours off a human life by exacerbating climate change.鈥
Would these labels drive consumers to purchase food with a smaller carbon footprint and less negative impact on humans?
Zia Mehrabi wants to find out.
In a recent paper, in the journal Nature Human Behavior, he and collaborator Ginni Braich, a senior data scientist at 兔子先生传媒文化作品, use existing data on deaths per pound of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere to calculate how much high-emission products like beef, gasoline, and flights shorten life expectancy worldwide. They call for regulators to mandate labels on these products and services, indicating their contributions to climate change and their impact on human well-being.
Zia Mehrabi
This policy could encourage consumers and food manufacturers to buy and produce food with smaller impacts, Mehrabi said.
He notes that the food industry, including production and transportation, emits a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The developing world, however, takes the brunt of the impact of climate change, including extreme heat, drought and flooding, and resulting damage to human health.
For example, suggested that the U.S., one of the world鈥檚 top emitters, caused nearly $2 trillion in climate damage to other countries between 1990 and 2014, including $310 billion in losses to Brazil and $257 billion to India.
鈥淚f you compute the number of people who die or will die due to an additional ton of carbon in the atmosphere today, the majority of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,鈥 said Mehrabi, assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and director of the . 鈥淲e are hoping to communicate those consequences with people through these labels and bring the human dimension into the climate dialogues.鈥
Ahead of Earth Day 2025, Mehrabi shared his take on adding carbon labels to certain products.听
Are there any carbon labels in use now?
Some companies are offering carbon labels on products. For example, if you use Google Flights to search, it will tell you the emissions associated with that flight.听If you are a consumer who cares about the environment, the label might influence what products you buy.听 Unilever also puts labels on products showing their carbon footprints.听 听
What are some problems with the current carbon labels?
For everyday citizens, even me as a scientist, it's very hard to contextualize what that emission number actually means in a real-world sense. How are 273 pounds of carbon emitted flying from Denver to Los Angeles going to impact ecosystems? How is that going to impact people in different parts of the world?
What if, instead, you knew that taking a transatlantic flight would end up removing 16 hours of someone else's life due to the impact of climate change? Or that eating a kilogram of steak costs more than five hours of someone else鈥檚 life?
These are tangible impacts, that the products we consume and the services we use are directly stripping life from other people.
An example cigarette package label (left). A food label that illustrates human effects of climate change (right). (Credit: Zia Mehrabi/兔子先生传媒文化作品)
Why is incorporating human impacts in these labels important?
It's an undeniable fact that the key perpetrators of climate change are the ones who feel the impacts the least, and the ones who are most affected are the people who have contributed least to the problem.
Embed human rights in that labeling so that you don't just know the number of greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with it, you also know the number of people that were impacted and how.
As consumers, as members of the public, and as citizens of our country and our world, we should have access to such information.
Should we put the burden of addressing climate change on individuals?
With these labels, consumers are not the main target. We want to drive the companies, the food manufacturers for example, to make changes.
If we can mandate such labels on high-emission food products, companies would be incentivized to reduce emissions elsewhere in their supply chain to compensate for the carbon-intensive products they sell to avoid those labels.
There are many solutions for reconfiguring the supply chain, so that the product is better for the environment. For example, there are more climate-friendly ways to farm food, using cleaner forms of energy. We have many of these solutions in the world right now. But producers, manufacturers and retailers are not really pressured in any way to take action.
What would the rollout look like?
There is needed discussion on how such labels should be rolled out. About 90% of the projected emissions over the next 50 years will come from the top 10% income earners of society. This indicates high-income brackets of society might be targeted.
According to the , everyone has a right to access a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
To do this companies need to change their practices, and they need to be forced to do this through regulation.
Could steps like this really slow down climate change?
I think carbon labeling, when incorporating human rights impacts, opens an opportunity for individuals to affect change through the choices they make. More critically, it can pressure companies toward more sustainable practices.
There is a lot of evidence that such labels work in practice in other domains, like high sugar labeling and tobacco labels.
There is a massive gap between what we need to do to tackle climate change, and what is actually being done in the world. We need all of our tools at our disposal. And we need ones that elicit rapid and radical change.听
兔子先生传媒文化作品 Today regularly publishes Q&As with our faculty members weighing in on news topics through the lens of their scholarly expertise and research/creative work. The responses here reflect the knowledge and interpretations of the expert and should not be considered the university position on the issue. All publication content is subject to edits for clarity, brevity and听university style guidelines.
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