Uncowlify: Beef & The Environment. by Atul Kumar, National Institute of Design

This data visualisation is part of my project which is an awareness campaign on the environmental effects of food consumption, especially beef, which is one of the most inefficient forms of food. Beef causes the largest amount of greenhouse gas emissions whilst also being one of the most resource consuming food sources. The idea is to give an overall view of the impact of beef consumption on the world carbon footprint as compared to other types of meat (excluding seafood due to lack of available and reliable data at the time of this project). The main sources of information were two reports by the United Nations ‘Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock’ and ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’, and another by Word Bank ‘Livestock and Climate Change’. Other resources were CIWF, PETA, New-Harvest, One Green Planet, The Guardian, BBC and few other web articles. The trigger behind this project was a brief mention in the National Geographic documentary ‘Before the Flood’ - I decided to investigate their quote - “Beef is the most inefficient form of food.”

An awareness campaign was designed around the theme of making people aware about the facts about their food choices and the visual mood was chosen to be abstract, colourful and positive in order to remove any connotations or notions related to beef as a food in different cultures and context, and to just focus on the empirical impacts of beef consumption as factual insights. The theme was kept positive and colourful to promote the idea that a change in the eating habit can have positive impact on the environment and health, and people should be encouraged towards this change.

For the same a range of posters, and merchandise were created along with an informative infographic and an interactive data visualisation.