Even as the geographical and doctrinal diversity of climate change litigation increases, climate lawsuits—whether they seek to hold private actors directly accountable or challenge government policies—continue to focus primarily on fossil fuels. This makes sense given that major oil and gas companies (sometimes called the “Carbon Majors”) are leading contributors to the climate crisis. But other industrial sectors also generate significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The animal agriculture sector plays a prominent role, estimated to produce between 11 and 20 percent of all global GHG emissions, about one-third of the world’s emissions of the climate super-pollutant methane, and more than half of global nitrous oxide emissions.
Though animal agriculture has long escaped most climate litigants’ notice, activists and lawyers in jurisdictions around the world are increasingly attentive to its responsibility for climate change. Our research discussing what we refer to as the “Methane Majors,” published in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, demonstrates this growing trend. As we argue, however, the full range of potential climate-related challenges to animal agriculture firms and their backers remains underexplored, including in U.S. courts.
Litigation Absent Regulation
Inadequate regulation is often seen as a primary motivator of climate advocates’ broader “turn to the courts.” That logic appears to apply with particular force to animal agriculture, which has largely enjoyed exemptions from climate change regulation, including in the United States and the European Union. This is despite the fact that animal agriculture is a leading source of potent climate pollutants, including methane and nitrous oxide, which the IPCC and others have long said must be rapidly cut in order to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
At COP28, where most state parties signed a nonbinding sustainable agriculture pledge, the conference’s final agreement only mentioned agriculture in the context of adaptation, not mitigation. In the United States, even though the industry is responsible for approximately 36% of anthropogenic methane emissions, animal agriculture’s GHG emissions (methane and otherwise) likewise remain largely unregulated. Despite environmental advocates’ calls for more meaningful regulations, the Biden administration’s 2021 methane emissions reduction plan did not seek to control animal agriculture emissions, instead focusing on incentive-based and voluntary approaches. Nor did EPA address animal agriculture when it strengthened oil and gas methane emissions regulations in late 2023. In the United States and other jurisdictions with such regulatory shortfalls, allegations related to animal agriculture thus feature in a variety of complaints against inadequate policy responses to climate change. Plaintiffs have characterized governments’ relative inaction on animal agriculture emissions as in violation of those governments’ constitutional, statutory, or international legal obligations.
The lack of regulatory action has also shaped common law tort suits directly against industry participants, as in a leading lawsuit in New Zealand, Smith v. Fonterra Co-operative Group Limited. In 2019, the climate change spokesperson for the Iwi Chairs’ Forum (a Māori advocacy coalition) filed suit against New Zealand’s seven largest greenhouse gas emitters for their contributions to climate change. The defendants include two animal agriculture firms: Fonterra Co-Operative Group Limited and Dairy Holdings Limited. The former is a multinational, publicly traded manufacturer and distributor of dairy products and the ninth largest dairy company in the world; the latter is New Zealand’s largest dairy farm operator and Fonterra’s primary milk supplier.
Smith’s allegations against Dairy Holdings are explicitly based on emissions from livestock. Emphasizing the risks posed by climate change to Māori communities’ customary interests in coastal lands, Smith pled three tort causes of action: negligence, public nuisance, and a novel “proposed climate system tort” entailing a legally cognizable duty “to cease materially contributing to: damage to the climate system; dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system; and the adverse effects of climate change.”
In February this year, the New Zealand Supreme Court ruled that all three causes of action could proceed to trial. Throughout the judgment, the Supreme Court accepted—without fanfare—animal agriculture’s presence among the significant sources of anthropogenic GHG emissions complained of in the suit. The court cited, “as common ground,” the IPCC’s observations regarding, inter alia, atmospheric methane, land use change, and “lifestyle and patterns of consumption and production.” The court also noted Smith’s claim that these emissions “are actually or effectively unconstrained by the current regulatory regime,” a reference to the fact that methane from agricultural sources––which represented over a third of New Zealand’s 2020 GHG emissions––was categorically excluded from the government’s statutory climate change response, leaving a major gap especially ripe for judicial intervention. Other courts have also proved willing to recognize animal agriculture as a significant source of GHG emissions, suggesting there is no particular barrier to recognizing the industry’s liability beyond the familiar obstacles that have arisen in cases against fossil-fuel defendants.
Enforcing Existing Protections
Though climate change regulations typically do not reach the animal agriculture industry, litigants have seized upon existing, generally applicable statutory frameworks to challenge alleged climate-related harms and misconduct by animal agriculture defendants. At least two important categories of such cases are worth noting: (1) supply-chain due diligence and (2) consumer protection.
Supply Chain Due Diligence
In Europe, national and EU laws increasingly recognize private actors’ obligation to conduct supply-chain due diligence. Existing rules may soon be augmented with broader due diligence obligations for the largest EU companies, requiring them to take steps to avoid adverse human rights and environmental impacts throughout their global operations, including by planning for climate change mitigation.
France has a particularly strong “duty of vigilance” law that requires large companies to establish, implement, and publish an annual due-diligence plan addressing the risks their operations pose to human rights, fundamental liberties, and the health and security of persons and the environment. In March 2021, nearly a dozen non-governmental organizations (NGOs)—including the environmental group Envol Vert and Indigenous representatives—invoked this duty of vigilance in a lawsuit against the French retail group Casino. The claimants alleged the “implication” of Casino and its subsidiaries in systematic environmental and human rights violations caused by livestock operations in Brazil and Colombia. (An Envol Vert investigation had shown that Casino’s meat suppliers were involved in “illegal deforestation and land grabbing practices.”) According to the complaint, Casino’s vigilance plans were insufficient, both in terms of specificity and substance, to address the heightened human, climatic, and ecological risks associated with the cattle industry, including deforestation, forced labor, and the appropriation of Indigenous lands. Hearings in the case began in early 2023, substantive pleadings expected to begin in 2024. In the meantime, the lawsuit has already heightened scrutiny of Casino’s operations. A 2023 investigation revealed that the firm’s supply chain remained tainted with animals farmed on Indigenous and protected lands, undercutting Casino’s claims in court that it was exercising adequate due diligence.
Another animal agriculture-related case arising under the same law began in October 2022, when French and Brazilian NGOs sent a notice of intent to sue the European banking giant BNP Paribas (BNP) for financing cattle operations in Brazil, which the demand characterized as having “dramatic” climate consequences. The case focused in particular on BNP’s financing of Marfrig, Brazil’s second-largest meatpacker, despite Marfrig’s history of environmental and human-rights abuses and BNP’s own public commitments to net-zero goals. As the demand recounted, Marfrig is one of the world’s top emitters of methane. After the action was deemed inadmissible for lack of formal notice, another group of NGOs filed a new complaint with the French national prosecutor, seeking criminal enforcement against BNP and other French banks alleged to have financed illegal deforestation and thereby engaged in money laundering.
Last year, California enacted the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, which would require public and private companies with global revenues of at least $1 billion that meet a minimal trigger of “doing business in California” to disclose their Scope 3 (supply chain) emissions. The SEC adopted a more limited emissions disclosure rule in March 2024. If they survive legal challenge, the disclosures these enactments require could deliver more information to potential litigants about animal agriculture companies and their emissions, climate plans, and commitments. Information of this kind plays an important role in another class of climate change and animal agriculture litigation: consumer protection.
Consumer Protection
In a few early cases, animal agriculture companies are facing consumer protection claims aimed at climate misrepresentations. The earliest lawsuit in this arena targeted Danish Crown, a major processor of pork (the European Union’s largest) and beef, the global GHG emissions of which are equivalent to nearly one-third of Denmark’s national total (based on 2016 emissions data). In May 2021, in response to a “climate-controlled pig” promotional campaign, three Danish NGOs sued Danish Crown for misleading consumers by misrepresenting the carbon footprint of its products in violation of Denmark’s Marketing Practices Act. Following the lawsuit’s filing, Danish Crown announced it would stop using the “climate-controlled pig” label on its packaging, though it continued to use that terminology on its website. It also continued to defend the terminology as an effort to communicate that its pig suppliers were “actively working to lower their [carbon dioxide]footprint.”
Testifying at trial in November 2023, a former Danish Crown director revealed that the firm had launched the “climate-controlled pig” campaign without being able to guarantee that products bearing that label had actually been produced using special climate mitigation measures. Another witness, the firm’s sustainability director, “admitted that the soy feed given to animals is not all deforestation-free.” In a March 2024 ruling, Denmark’s Western High Court found that Danish Crown had unlawfully misled consumers with its “climate-controlled pig” campaign, though it suggested that future uses of the term might be permissible if adequately supported by emissions reductions.
Danish Crown was the first in a series of similar cases. Sweden’s consumer protection agency subsequently brought a case against major European dairy producer Arla Foods, the global GHG emissions of which are projected to amount to more than 60 percent of Denmark’s entire Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement by 2030. The Swedish Patent and Market Court enjoined the firm from marketing dairy products as having a “net-zero climate footprint,” finding that such claims misled consumers, notwithstanding Arla’s assertion that its “promise of net zero [was] based on climate-compensating activities.” Arla, which under the Swedish court’s judgment faces a fine of nearly 100,000 U.S. dollars if it violates the injunction, has discontinued its net-zero advertising.
A similar case has now emerged in the United States against JBS USA, another meat processing company and major GHG emitter. New York’s Attorney General recently filed suit, accusing the company of violating the state’s consumer protection statutes with “sweeping representations to consumers about [JBS’s] commitment to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions” that the firm “has had no viable plan to meet” and “could not feasibly meet . . . because there are no proven agricultural practices to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero at the JBS Group’s current scale, and offsetting those emissions would be a costly undertaking of an unprecedented degree.” New York’s lawsuit, which seeks a variety of judicially enforceable remedies including injunctive relief, civil penalties, and disgorgement, builds on prior nonjudicial advocacy efforts. In 2023, the environmental NGO Mighty Earth submitted a whistleblower complaint to the SEC, seeking an investigation into “Sustainability-Linked Bonds” issued by JBS. The complaint alleged that the bonds were misleading because, among other things, the company’s GHG emissions continue to grow. A month after the complaint was submitted, JBS sought to appeal a parallel finding by the National Advertising Division (NAD) of the nongovernmental Better Business Bureau, which had “determined that JBS’ ‘net zero’ claims reasonably create[d] consumer expectations that the advertiser’s efforts [we]re providing environmental benefits,” and held that JBS’s “preliminary efforts” fell short of its claims. The appellate body rejected JBS’s appeal and recommended that the firm stop making the net-zero claims at issue.
What Comes Next?
Early developments in climate change and animal agriculture litigation and nonjudicial advocacy are promising. Many of these efforts have unfolded in non-U.S. jurisdictions but are adaptable to the U.S. legal context. Moreover, a growing body of U.S. cases is challenging animal agriculture’s climate impacts in lawsuits directed at government policies and decisions, sometimes successfully. For climate advocates, U.S. litigation may be especially appealing because of the failure of U.S. regulators to address the animal agriculture industry’s emissions and because of the scale of the industry: the United States exports a surplus of meat and dairy in addition to having exceptionally high domestic per capita consumption.
Our work has identified a wide variety of legal claims that might emerge. Notwithstanding some judicial reluctance to expand common-law liability to cover climate change harms, early indications from several pending suits, especially Fonterra, suggest that this strategy has potential. Additional litigation activity grounded in consumer protection theories and climate-related financial risk also seems likely. Meanwhile, U.S. plaintiffs will no doubt continue to invoke procedural and environmental statutes to oppose adverse administrative actions related to climate change and animal agriculture. Non-judicial grievance mechanisms offer further paths by which to increase awareness and shape public discourse in favor of constraints on animal agriculture’s GHG emissions.
Time is short. According to a 2023 U.N. report, to meet climate goals and avoid the worst effects of climate change, global GHG emissions must be cut nearly in half by 2030—now less than six years away. But the report paints a grim picture of progress to date: “[w]ith a climate cataclysm looming, the pace and scale of current climate action plans are wholly insufficient to effectively tackle climate change.” Even dramatic decarbonization is likely to prove inadequate without simultaneous action to curb climate super-pollutants, like methane and nitrous oxide, which animal agriculture produces in significant quantities. Well-founded litigation might be uniquely positioned to facilitate such action—which likely must include reduced production and consumption of animal products—where gridlocked political processes have failed.
Daina Bray
Daina Bray is a Clinical Lecturer in Law and a Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and a leading animal protection attorney. Since 2021, Bray has served as a Senior Litigation Fellow and Project Manager at the Law, Ethics, and Animals Program at Yale Law School, where she has overseen the Climate Change & Animal Agriculture Litigation Initiative. She previously practiced law at White & Case LLP, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer US LLP, and Phelps Dunbar LLP. From 1998–1999, Bray completed a Fulbright Scholarship in affiliation with the University of the West Indies–Mona’s Institute for Sustainable Development and the Jamaica Environment Trust. She is a 2004 graduate of Stanford Law School, where she received Pro Bono distinction, and a 1998 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar and member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Thomas Poston
Thomas Poston is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where he has served as a Herbert Hansell Student Fellow of the Center for Global Legal Challenges and an Articles Editor for the Yale Journal of International Law. He studied sustainable development and migration as a Fulbright research fellow in Cambodia and has worked on a variety of international and environmental challenges at the U.S. Department of State, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Thomas received his B.A. in Politics & International Affairs and Economics, summa cum laude, from Wake Forest, where he was inducted Phi Beta Kappa.
