Changing Chicken for Net-Zero: Practices and beliefs from the poultry industry

UKRI Scoping Project (2023-24)

Changing Chicken for Net-Zero

Practices and beliefs from the poultry industry

What do you know about the chicken that gets eaten as meat?

What happens to the parts of the chicken that aren’t eaten by us?

What is needed to grow the chicken we eat?

Where does the food come from the chickens need?

Who supplies the energy needed to keep the chickens comfortable?

And how does this all relate to UK net-zero targets?

What are your ideas about how the poultry industry can reach net-zero by 2050?

The UK Government has set out a strategy to decarbonising all sectors of the UK economy to meet a net-zero target by 2050. Non-scientific communities are often unaware of the net-zero goals that are being set or don’t really understand what becoming carbon-neutral actually entitles. Our aim is to learn about beliefs and practices linked to awareness and interest to engage with carbon net-zero.

In this project we focus on people in dual-roles both consumer-citizens and employees in the UK poultry industry. Chicken meat is regarded as one of the lower carbon footprint protein sources. However, the footprint is not net-zero yet and the biggest contributor to the footprint is the feed to grow the chickens and finding a home for all parts of the chicken carcass. We would like to understand the existing beliefs and practices among both poultry industry employees and consumer-citizens. What is (un)known, what could or can’t be done, and why?

Changing Chicken for Net-Zero is a collaborative research between Universities of Southampton, Gloucestershire, Oxford, Bristol and Aston, in partnership with The Applied Group and funded by the UK Research Institute and AFN Network+. The project mixes industry engagement and public engagement with a novel workshop format in order to open up discussions on practices and beliefs as they relate to changing poultry for net-zero. The poultry industry’s relation to net-zero needs to be examined within and beyond the UK. We are not only interested in how the industry perceives the net-zero production targets and actions and how they expect to be dealing with them. But we are also very interested in hearing what consumer-citizen’s understandings are of the net-zero challenges that lay ahead.

We try and do this by organising workshop, like Build-a-Chick to get people talking about how they feel the life of the chicken we consume, is linked to carbon/environmental footprints.