Encouraging reduced meat consumption to mitigate climate change: Toward an understanding of NGO campaign and messaging choices in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden

With climate change now representing one of the greatest threats to global public health, questions arise about how we can mitigate this change to prevent future harms. While much attention has been focused on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from energy production and manufacturing, dietary choices too represent a significant area for change. Meat consumption in particular represents a major source of emissions, with the United Nations Environment Programme estimating that livestock production makes up 18-25 percent of global GHG emissions. Accordingly, reduced meat consumption is an important strategy for climate change mitigation. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) represent one possible source of needed efforts to achieve this goal.;Yet despite strong evidence on the emissions arising from livestock production and the significant public health implications of climate change, NGO efforts to reduce meat consumption have seemingly been limited. This dissertation seeks to shed light on the issue by using a grounded theory approach to understand how and why environmental, food-focused, and animal welfare NGOs in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden have worked, or not worked, to encourage decreased meat consumption in response to the evidence linking meat consumption to climate change.;Findings suggest that large public education campaigns aimed at reducing meat consumption in light of climate change remain quite limited and are primarily the domain of animal welfare and food-focused NGOs. Policy advocacy campaigns seeking reduced meat consumption are even more rare. Further, despite the fact that entirely meat-free diets have been found to have lower emissions than omnivorous diets, the promotion of meat-free diets is rare outside of animal welfare NGOs. The reasons for this lack of action are complex, but can largely be attributed to the core missions of NGOs, the perceived political infeasibility of policy efforts and limited public support for climate change mitigation more generally, and the strong cultural significance of meat consumption in the West. While these barriers to action lack a straightforward policy solution, recommendations are made to help raise the profile of this issue among NGOs.