One should not trust too much when a large meat or dairy company claims it will achieve climate neutrality by 2050 or save billions of liters of water by 2030: a study published this Wednesday in Plos Climate estimates that 98% of recent environmental declarations and commitments by the world’s largest companies in this sector can be categorized as greenwashing. The researchers who scrutinized the green announcements of these companies, belonging to the universities of Miami and New York (USA), assure that there are many promises, but little scientific evidence to support them. In fact, as Maya Bach, a dietitian specializing in environmental sustainability and lead author of the work, specifies by email, the other 2% are not more credible commitments either, but neutral statements that are not linked to any company’s announcements.
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On April 25, 2021, the world’s largest meat company, Brazil’s JBS, paid for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times stating: “Agriculture can be part of the climate solution. Bacon, chicken wings, and steak with net-zero emissions. It’s possible.” This advertisement, along with other subsequent company statements about its commitment to achieve zero emissions by 2040, were cited as an example by New York Attorney General Letitia James in a lawsuit against this meat giant for “misrepresenting the environmental impact of its products.” As Jennifer Jacquet, another researcher from the University of Miami who participated in the Plos Climate study, recounts, “that lawsuit [which ended up including the payment of more than 1.1 million dollars] led us to wonder if greenwashing was common among meat and dairy companies.”
This is how the researchers decided to analyze the websites and sustainability reports (between 2021 and 2024) of the 33 largest meat and dairy companies in the world. Among them, nine are based in the US, and the others are spread across the globe, such as JBS (Brazil), Nestlé (Switzerland), Danone (France), DMK (Germany), Yurun Food (China), CP Group (Thailand)… The list includes one Spanish company: the Coren group. After dissecting all this material, they identified 1,233 environmental claims, most of them, 68%, related to climate.
According to the results of the Plos Climate study, of the 1,233 environmental statements analyzed, 38% were unverifiable future projections, such as “achieving carbon neutrality by 2030” or “enabling the restoration of 600 billion liters of water in water-scarce regions by 2030.” Also, of those 1,233 claims, only 29% were accompanied by validating evidence, and only three were supported by academic scientific evidence.
“The good news is that many of the largest meat and dairy companies feel the need to talk about environmental issues; the bad news is that much of this remains just words and not concrete actions,” highlights Jacquet, who believes that, although these bad practices occur in other sectors, the meat and dairy sector should be especially scrutinized due to its high environmental impact.
Of the 33 companies evaluated, the research determines that 17 have made net-zero emissions commitments, an objective that means reducing climate-changing gases to a minimum that can be absorbed by nature. However, it also finds that, as with oil and gas companies, these commitments are based more on plans to offset emissions (paying, for example, for reductions or credits accounted for in forests), rather than implementing actions to decarbonize their business activity.
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The scientific work also examines the investments reported as capital expenditures (CAPEX) in these companies’ sustainability reports to advance their commitments. “They make many promises, but they don’t establish a clear plan to achieve them,” explains Jacquet. “Nor do they seem to have financial investments to back up their promises. Only one of the companies, Nestlé, declared significant capital investments related to its climate goals.”
After these evaluations, the researchers from the universities of Miami and New York took the 1,233 selected environmental statements again and examined them, this time using a specific greenwashing analysis tool developed a few years ago by other scientists. That’s where they found that 96% of these large companies’ green claims can be categorized as greenwashing. The researchers highlight the frequent use of overly vague language (such as “sustainable food producer”) and the scarce information on how emissions are measured, which casts doubt on the credibility of these statements. Likewise, they believe that these companies prioritize small efficiency improvements and intensely publicize small-scale initiatives with little impact on the overall environmental footprint of livestock farming, instead of promoting transformative change.
As the scientific work emphasizes, the degree of greenwashing found can even have legal implications, particularly in the US. In the case of the Spanish group Coren, Bach details that “its statements range from general commitments (such as ‘working every day to achieve emissions neutrality by 2040’) to efforts focused on resource optimization and the implementation of waste management technologies.” “In general, they make relatively few statements (eight) compared to other companies we analyzed,” the lead researcher stresses.
As Marina San Martín Calvo, a professor of Commercial Law at the University of Burgos, points out to Science Media Center (SMC) Spain, “this very interesting research work is based on a solid methodological foundation, using a transparent coding process and well-defined criteria.” “Its results suggest the need to strengthen the mechanisms for regulating and verifying environmental declarations, both at the institutional level and in the consumer sphere. It would be advisable to move towards stricter reporting standards. All of this would contribute to a more credible and effective transition towards truly sustainable food systems.”
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