Introduction

Climate change is one of today's biggest challenges. Agriculture is an important contributor to climate change, notably meat production. Meat can be very expensive in terms of resources to produce: it takes 15'415 liters of water to produce a single kilogram of beef. Reducing meat consumption would be a great option to reduce our ecological impact on the planet.

In this project, we aim to see if we can determine some of the drivers behind people's meat consumption. We look at the general meat consumption in Europe:
    - What is the overall trend ? Who are the biggest meat eaters ?

We then try to determine whether certain factors can be associated with meat consumption.
    - Is the economic situation of a country, such as wealth or a recession, related to meat consumption ?

And by delving deeper into a specific country, France:
    - Does the price of meat have an impact on meat consumption ? Does unemployment (as a proxy for recessions) ?
    - Can we see an association with interest in climate change and global warming, or their coverage in the press ?



Meat Consumption in the European Union

Meat consumption per country

We see that meat consumption in the above graph tends to diminish starting 2007-2008.

Even though this applies to many countries in the EU, we notice that some do not follow this trend (eg.: Bulgaria, Germany, Romania, etc.).

Luxembourg and Spain are the countries that eat a high amount of meat (over 90 kg per person per year) whereas Bulgaria, Romania are the lowest consumer of EU (around 50).

Economic Situation

Wealth and Meat Consumption in Europe

As meat is typically expensive, we could expect an association between the wealth of a country and its meat consumption. All countries in Europe do not have the same quality of life, and life quality may also influence meat consumption. We use GDP per capita to measure country wealth, and our data is from the OECD. Let us first plot the GDP per capita over the last ten years.

We can see that Western Europe and northern countries have a high gdp per capita, and eastern countries lower. We can also note that GDP per capita has been growing for all countries.

Do we also see an increase in meat consumption ?
Let's plot the meat consumption per gdp per capita, for all countries and all dates from 2004 to 2013.

We see what seems like a fairly strong correlation between gdp and meat consumption, with R-squared value of 0.3 for degree 1 and 0.38 for degree 3. From the degree 1 regression line, we could roughly expect an increase of 0.004 of meat consumption per increase of GDP per capita.

This picture is however not quite right; we now plot the result also by year, and additionally group countries by clustering using k-means, with 3 clusters.

We can first note that the clustering is meaningful: the first group corresponds roughly to poorer countries (mostly eastern), the second group to richer EU countries, and the third to Luxembourg. These groupings are also stable through time, with essentially only Spain and Greece moving from group 2 to group 1, which makes sense as these two countries have been particularly hit by the 2008 economic crisis.

The poorer group consumes on average less meat than the richer countries, 69.69 vs 86.31 kg per capita in 2004. We can also see that poorer countries show a stronger variation, with 50 for Bulgaria and 90 for Hungary, whereas richer countries are more similar. Within these groups, however, consumption does not increase much with time: the average for poor countries is 70.834 in 2013 and 86.97 for richer countries in 2013. This is despite the average GDP per capita increasing by almost 75% for poor countries and 39% for richer countries.
How can we explain this result, seemingly paradoxical compared to the previous correlation ?

We note that countries that have been rich for longer eat more meat; but countries do not change their meat consumption by much, even as their income can grow quite fast. This can mean that wealth impacts meat consumption in the long term but not in the short term, which can depend more on non-economic factors such as cultural habits. Can a short term change in economic situation still impact meat consumption ? Let us retake our first average meat consumption graph. We can see that average consumption increased until 2007, then decreased; this period corresponds to the economic crisis in Europe. The change in consumption is however not very large. Our conclusion is that changes in wealth has a small impact in the short term, but potentially significant in the long term, with more wealth leading to higher meat consumption.

France

Change in meat price in France does not seem to explain change in consumption


We can see that all types of meat follow an oscillating price pattern. On the graph above we can see that the main pattern in the consumption of meat is a drop following 2008.

As such, prices do not follow an inverse pattern to consumption, and do not seem to have a big influence on consumption.

Economic considerations could explain the drop in meat consumption in France in 2008


We see a sharp increase after 2008 in the number of job seekers, which we consider as a proxy for the overall economic health of the country. This means that the drop, rather than being related to meat price, is likely related to increased poverty following the 2008 economic crisis.

Interest in Climate Change and Meat Consumption

We now look to see if we can find a relation between interest in climate change and global warming and meat consumption in France. We could expect a higher interest to mean less consumption. We estimate the interest in climate change by using google trends, with search keywords for "climate change" and "global warming". Let us plot these results along with annotations for important dates and average meat meat consumption in France.

We first see a clear relation between interest and climate change related events such as the COP. But we can also note that meat consumption and interest move close together, altough the overall consumption is fairly stable.

This is a curious result: the higher the interest in climate change, the more meat consumption, how can we explain this ?

This is most likely due to another factor, the economic situation around the same period, as discussed previously.

Our conclusion is that the change in meat consumption in that period was most likely due to the economic crisis, and that environmental interest did not translate into a change of meat consumption.
Let us now see if we can identify a different tendency when looking at different types of meat.

Interest in climate change and meat consumption for different types of meat

Beef shows the strongest relation with climate change interest, and the change in consumption is actually fairly large, at almost 15%.

Poultry consumption, on the other hand, always increases, with an increase over the period of around 20%

Pork shows a fairly stable consumption, with maximum change of about 6%.

This is in accordance with our intuition that the driver is mostly economical.
Beef should show the largest decline with increased climate change interest as it is the most environmentally taxing; but we see the opposite. That beef shows the largest decline is then most likely related to the fact that it is the most expensive, with people switching their consumption to poultry.

Coverage of climate change in French media

In this final section we look into the relation between meat consumption and climate change related coverage in two large French journals, Le Monde and Le Figaro.

We can see that the journal coverage pattern is similar to the climage change interest.
On other hand, it does most likely does not drive in change in meat consumption, for the same reasons as in the previous section.

Conclusion

Meat consumption is an important consideration to tackle climate change. We have looked into meat consumption in Europe and France, and its association with different factors that could impact consumption. We have made the following observations:

    - We have seen that wealth and economic considerations play a role in determining people's consumption, but mostly in the long term, and that a fast change in wealth does not quickly affect meat consumption.

    - We have seen that in France, the drop in meat consumption in 2008 is more likely related to the economic situation than to the price of meat.

    - That in France at least, meat consumption does not seem to be related to interest in climate change.

    - That people's interest in climate change is fairly related to news coverage.