Research & Evidence

The science is no longer in dispute.

On sentience, ecological impact, and public health, the peer-reviewed record now points in one direction.

The evidence base

What we know, and how we know it

Our work does not rest on sentiment. It rests on decades of converging research from neuroscience, ecology, and epidemiology — published in the leading journals, declared by panels of scientists, and tracked by the world’s monitoring bodies. The findings below are cited in full so they can be read at the source.

Six findings

The peer-reviewed record

Animal Sentience

Consciousness is shared

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness affirmed that mammals, birds, and even octopuses possess the neurological substrates of conscious experience. The 2024 New York Declaration extends this to most vertebrates and many invertebrates.

Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 2012

Ecological Impact

Land could regenerate

A worldwide transition to plant-based diets could reduce agricultural land use by approximately 75 percent — from 4.1 billion hectares to 1 billion — allowing forests, wetlands, and habitats to regenerate.

Poore & Nemecek, Science, 2018

Public Health

A measurable link

Of 92 peer-reviewed papers examining agricultural antibiotic use and human resistance, 59% found direct evidence of a link. Antimicrobial resistance already kills 1.27 million people annually.

WHO Antimicrobial Resistance Report

Wildlife

Populations in decline

Monitored vertebrate wildlife populations have declined 73% since 1970 — a collapse measured across thousands of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians.

WWF Living Planet Report, 2024

Biomass

A planet remade

96% of mammal biomass on Earth is now human or livestock; wild mammals comprise only 4%. The living world has been reshaped around a single set of appetites.

WWF Living Planet Report, 2024

Food Systems

Abundance, misallocated

Around 92 billion land animals are slaughtered annually, while 673 million people experience hunger on a planet capable of feeding everyone. The problem is not scarcity, but distribution.

FAO / UN food systems data

Sunlight filtering through the canopy of an ancient forest onto a quiet path.
The upside in the data

What regeneration looks like

The same research that documents the scale of the problem also describes the scale of the recovery. If global agricultural land use fell by roughly three-quarters, more than three billion hectares — an area larger than the combined surface of the world’s continents-worth of farmland — would be released from production. That land does not stay empty.

Forests return. Wetlands refill. Grasslands and the species they hold begin to rebuild. The evidence frames a transition not as sacrifice but as restoration: the single largest opportunity available to reverse habitat loss, draw down carbon, and let wild populations climb back from the declines now being measured.

A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth — not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, land use and water use.
Joseph Poore · University of Oxford Science, Volume 360, Issue 6392 · June 2018

Help turn evidence into action

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