Meat the Challenge: Designing an Effective Eco-Label to Reduce Meat Consumption

The Climate Crisis is an existential and accelerating emergency for humankind. Addressing climate change requires drastic shifts in human behaviour and a comprehensive realignment of industries towards practices that significantly reduce their impact on nature, climate, and the planet. One of the industries contributing considerably to the destruction of planet earth is the meat and livestock industry. To effectively combat climate change, the farming of livestock and subsequent production of meat for human consumption needs to reduce dramatically. One effective way to reduce production is for individuals to reduce their meat consumption. This thesis aims to design and test new eco-labels focused on promoting meat reduction behaviour. The value and originality of this thesis is centred around three main observations. Firstly, few previous studies have tested the effectiveness of eco-labels on changing meat choice behaviours. Secondly, the small number of studies testing eco-labels effect on meat reduction behaviour has produced mixed effects. Finally, no studies exist that have tested the potential of combining traffic light and warning labelling to reduce hypothetical meat meal selection behaviours. In the introduction, climate change and the problem of meat are discussed. Additionally, an overview of the existing research into labelling, eco-labelling, and eco-labelling of meat is outlined. Chapter 2 presents a systematic review of the research that has tested the effectiveness of eco-labels to change behaviour using experimental methods. This review demonstrated that whilst there is mixed evidence around eco-labels effectiveness, there is extremely limited research on the potential effectiveness of eco-labels to reduce meat consumption. Chapter 3 contains the first empirical study testing a new warning label design which emulates tobacco warning labels. This piece of research attempts to identify whether focusing on the climate impact of food is the most effective way to use warnings to reduce meat consumption compared to a health or pandemic risk warning label. Results showed that warning labels reduced meat meal selection and that there was no statistically significant difference between the use of a warning label focused on health, environment, or pandemic risk. In Chapter 4 a subsequent empirical study attempts to take the design of the environmental warning label from the previous study and combine it with the commonly used traffic light label design. This research also tested various configurations and compared positive and negatively framed labels impact on meat reduction. Results showed that a red/orange/green traffic light label design on all products or a negatively framed red only label on unfavourable products reduced meat meal selection. A positively framed green only label on favourable products was not statistically different from the unlabelled control. To conclude, the General Discussion of Chapter 5, brings together the findings of the empirical research to discuss the efficacy and potential effectiveness of the new environmental traffic light warning label design. Implications, policy recommendations, and future research are discussed.