By Cheryl Lyn Dybas
The Jumbo
Carbon Footprint of a
Surf-and-Turf Dinner
RIPPLE MARKS: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
What’s the carbon footprint of an average
shrimp-and-steak dinner?
If it comes from the conversion of man-
grove forests to aquaculture and agri-
culture, it’s 1,795 pounds of carbon diox-
ide. That’s about the same amount of
greenhouse gases produced by driving
a fuel-efficient car from Los Angeles to
New York City.
Clearcutting of tropical mangrove for-
ests to create shrimp ponds and cat-
tle pastures contributes significantly to
greenhouse gases and global warming,
according to findings reported in the May
2017 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and
the Environment.
“The results mean that 1,603 pounds
of carbon dioxide are released for every
pound of shrimp, and 1,440 pounds of
carbon dioxide for each pound of beef”
from mangrove forest conversion, says
J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at Oregon
State University who led the project.
NEW MEASUREMENT: THE LAND-USE
CARBON FOOTPRINT
Those numbers were obtained with a
new measurement called the land-use
carbon footprint. It records the amount of
carbon stored in an intact mangrove for-
est, the greenhouse gas emissions from
conversion of that forest to aquaculture
or agriculture, and the quantity of the
shrimp or beef produced over the life of
the land’s use.
“What we found was astounding,”
Kauffman says. “When you convert man-
grove forests to shrimp ponds or cattle
pastures, a remarkable amount of car-
bon is being emitted into the atmosphere.
And the food productivity of these sites
is not very high.”
Scientists have the difficult task of clearly
conveying the ecological consequences
of forest and wetland losses to the pub-
lic, state Kauffman and coauthors in their
Oceanography | Vol.30, No.3