The scale of the stakes is enormous. Food production occupies roughly 40 percent of all habitable land on Earth, drives about 80 percent of deforestation, and accounts for some 70 percent of terrestrial biodiversity loss. Livestock production sits at the center of this crisis, consuming one-third of the global cereal harvest, requiring about 40 percent of global arable land, and claiming all of the world’s pastures. Cattle production is particularly damaging because it combines direct on-farm emissions from enteric fermentation and manure with indirect emissions from feed production and land-use change. At the same time, the food system contributes roughly a third of total global greenhouse gas emissions, and climate change in turn accelerates biodiversity loss by altering habitats, disrupting migration patterns, and intensifying extreme weather events.

Previous life cycle assessments have generally concluded that meat analogues outperform beef across environmental indicators, but most of those studies relied on fixed or simplified supply chains and global-average environmental intensity data. That approach overlooks a crucial reality: the same ingredient can carry wildly different biodiversity consequences depending on the country and ecosystem it comes from. The new study addresses this gap by combining environmentally extended multi-regional input-output models with the GLAM life cycle impact assessment framework, which provides spatially and taxonomically explicit characterization factors for both land use and climate change. The GLAM land-use factors jointly account for land-use intensity and habitat fragmentation within a species-habitat relationship framework, while its climate factors model pixel-based temperature niche limits for individual species.

The technical machinery behind the analysis is considerable. The team employed a tiered hybrid model called FABEXIO, which integrates the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output database, covering 191 countries and 123 food commodities, with EXIOBASE to capture non-biomass inputs such as fuels, fertilizers, and energy that conventional biomass models miss. The functional unit was a single raw burger patty of 113 grams, with recipes drawn from earlier experimental work on meat substitutes. Four alternatives were compared against beef: patties based on pea protein, soy protein, mealworm insects, and mycoprotein, a fungal protein grown on sugar-beet molasses. The ten consuming countries, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Spain, jointly represent about 80 percent of EU beef consumption and 82 percent of the associated biodiversity impacts.

The headline result is that land occupation dominates terrestrial biodiversity impacts, accounting for more than 96 percent of the total across all patty types and all countries, with climate change contributing less than 4 percent. This finding aligns with the IPBES global assessment, which identifies land-use change as the leading cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss, but it contradicts earlier life cycle studies that had identified climate change as the dominant driver using older impact assessment methods. Beef patties generally showed the highest land-driven biodiversity impacts, driven jointly by pastures and cropland, with pastures dominating in Spain, Greece, and Italy. On climate-driven impacts, beef also ranked highest everywhere, primarily due to methane emissions from the cattle themselves.

But the most surprising result concerns the pea patty. In Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland, the pea-based burger actually exceeded beef in terrestrial biodiversity impact. The culprit is coconut oil. Although it makes up only 5.7 grams of a pea patty, coconut oil sourced largely from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vanuatu dominates the biodiversity impacts of pea and mycoprotein patties, contributing roughly 75 percent and 58 percent of their totals respectively. Tropical ecosystems carry extremely high biodiversity sensitivity in the GLAM framework because of high global extinction probabilities, small ecoregion sizes, and fragmented land-use patterns, with cropland characterization factors in the Philippines and Indonesia reaching up to 2.2 times ten to the minus fourteen PDF per square meter. By contrast, beef supply chains in the countries where pea patties performed worst are highly diversified, relying primarily on domestic production with modest imports from Australia, India, and Italy, all of which have comparatively low biodiversity sensitivity.

The decoupling between land-use footprints and biodiversity impacts is one of the study’s most consequential insights. Pea protein, the main ingredient at 20 grams per patty, dominates the pea patty’s land-use footprint at about 46 percent but contributes only around 14 percent of its biodiversity impact, because it is sourced mostly within the EU. Similarly, molasses, the main substrate for mycoprotein patties at 339 grams per patty, accounts for roughly 40 percent of the land footprint but only about 23 percent of biodiversity impacts on average. Conventional mass-based life cycle assessment methods, and land-use footprints more broadly, systematically fail to capture these spatial differences in biodiversity sensitivity, meaning high-impact, low-mass ingredients like coconut oil can slip through the environmental accounting unnoticed.

Not all alternatives fared badly. Soy patties consistently delivered the lowest biodiversity impacts across all ten countries, with their impacts driven mainly by soy protein and rape oil. Replacing beef patties with soy patties in food service, assumed to represent about 5 percent of national beef consumption, could reduce land-driven biodiversity impacts by 71 to 97 percent per patty, corresponding to an estimated 3.6 to 4.9 percent reduction in national biodiversity loss associated with beef. The largest gains would come in Spain, Greece, and Italy, where beef’s impact is highest at around 96 to 97 percent reduction, while Belgium would see the smallest benefit at 71 percent. Even here, geography matters: rape oil sourced from Australia, with a cropland factor of 9.1 times ten to the minus fifteen PDF per square meter, drove up impacts in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, while domestic sourcing kept impacts lower in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania.

The sensitivity analyses tested the robustness of these conclusions against alternative allocation ratios, protein-based and energy-based functional units, and beef patty composition. The best- and worst-performing patties remained largely unchanged under most scenarios, though under an energy-based functional unit soy patties lost their top position in Belgium, Germany, and Poland due to their relatively low energy content of 191 kilocalories per patty. The most dramatic shift came when coconut oil was replaced with rape oil on a mass-equivalent basis: biodiversity impacts fell by approximately 74 percent for pea patties and 62 percent for mycoprotein patties, transforming the rankings. Under that scenario, beef patties consistently exhibited the highest biodiversity impacts across all countries, demonstrating that a single reformulation decision can outweigh the choice of protein source itself.

The authors frame their findings as a warning against biodiversity leakage, the displacement of harmful activities from one region to another through trade and consumption shifts. Local environmental gains in Europe may be offset, or more than offset, by impacts displaced to more biodiversity-sensitive tropical regions. They also caution that avoided biodiversity impact means preventing further habitat occupation, not restoring degraded ecosystems, since spared land can be reoccupied for urban expansion, alternative agriculture, or biofuel production. Their recommendations are concrete: manufacturers should adopt biodiversity-aware sourcing and reformulate away from high-impact ingredients, while policymakers should embed biodiversity metrics into sustainability standards, public procurement, and labelling schemes for alternative-protein products. The message for consumers is nuanced but clear: the plant-based burger is not automatically the biodiversity-friendly choice, and the geography of the supply chain matters as much as the patty on the plate.

Subject of Research: Terrestrial biodiversity impacts of replacing beef patties with alternative-protein burgers across ten EU countries

Article Title: Terrestrial biodiversity impacts of replacing beef with alternative-protein burger patties across ten European Union Countries

Article References: Zhang, Y., Rasul, K., Dorber, M., Stadler, K., Hertwich, E. G., & Verones, F. (2026). Terrestrial biodiversity impacts of replacing beef with alternative-protein burger patties across ten European Union Countries. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 30(4), 1761-1777. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00120-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00120-1

Keywords: biodiversity, alternative protein, beef, plant-based burgers, life cycle assessment, land use, coconut oil, soy protein, mycoprotein, supply chains, European Union, food system