The meat industry may have enlisted environmental groups to persuade people to “feel better” about eating beef, despite the sector’s ballooning emissions of climate-heating pollution, according to a public relations strategy document.
The plan, created in 2021 by MHP Group, a London-based communications agency, was addressed to the the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, an umbrella organization comprised of beef-related companies such as restaurant chain McDonald’s and Brazil-based JBS — the world’s largest meat-packer. Other members include powerful American meat lobbies such as the Meat Institute, and nonprofits the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund.
The proposal aimed in part at blunting growing public enthusiasm for “opting out of eating beef as an alternative options become tastier, cheaper and more accessible,” in favor of seeing “beef [as] a natural and nutritious source of iron and protein” that “is enjoyed by millions.”
MHP Group’s strategy identified policymakers, regulators, investors, and beef industry stakeholders as its primary audiences. Its goals included promoting the Roundtable as “power[ing] progress in sustainable beef” as well as “champion[ing] best practices,” and assuring people that there was “growing momentum in the beef industry to protect and nurture the earth’s natural resources.”
The plan also targeted consumers who “feel ‘guilty’ about eating beef due to environmental and/or health reasons.” Here, the communications goal was “to help them feel better about eating beef (if not every day, then at least occasionally), and to be more aware of the ways in which the industry is protecting the planet and making progress.”
The strategy recommended enlisting “environmental partners,” among others, to convey these messages to policymakers, regulators, investors, and consumers. This was potentially a reference to the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which are both founding members of the Roundtable.
MHP Group, which worked for the Roundtable from 2020 to 2023, and UK communications agency Next15, which acquired MHP Group in 2022, did not respond to requests for comment. Next15 states on its website that it works “in support of a greener, more sustainable world.
With the livestock industry producing an estimated 12-20 percent of global carbon emissions, scientists say that the United States — which consumes 21 percent of the world’s beef — European countries, and other nations with large industrial livestock industries must rapidly reduce meat consumption if the world is going to avoid ever more catastrophic climate change and environmental decline.
Global meat production grew by 46 percent between 2002 and 2022.
The Roundtable has dismissed calls to cut back production, arguing that ranching techniques designed to encourage carbon sequestration in soils and grasslands, as well as technological innovations such as methane-reducing feed additives, will be adequate to curb emissions from livestock.
Scientists, however, seescant evidence that such approaches can make a meaningful contribution to tackling the climate crisis. Apart from producing greenhouse gases, livestock production is the key driver of deforestation in the Amazon and other sensitive tropical habitats, whose health is critical to stabilizing the global climate system.
The MHP Group strategy document’s emphasis on using “environmental partners” to reassure people about beef underscores the dilemma facing green organizations working with the Roundtable, which have long faced criticism for endorsing industry-preferred climate solutions that pose little threat to business as usual.
“[Environmental groups] are, in fact, providing cover for the industry and perpetuating the system, and giving it a nice little fairy dusting of respectability,” said Silvia Secchi, a professor of natural resource economics at the University of Iowa.
The meat industry has also established a significant presence at the annual U.N. Food Systems Summit, the fifth annual meeting of which wrapped up in Addis Ababa on 29 July. During the first summit in 2021, the Roundtable was among the livestock groups that threatened to withdraw from the process if the discussions failed to favor increased meat production.
Critics say the meat industry’s relationship with environmental groups in initiatives like the Roundtable echo tactics employed by oil and gas companies — which for decades have used sponsorships of community groups, sports, and cultural activities to portray themselves as good corporate citizens.
“The industry spends millions of dollars on this kind of tactic because it can be so effective,” said Anna Lappé, executive director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. “Particularly for industries like oil and gas or industrial beef — for which there has been growing public concern about their climate impact and for whom the public has diminishing trust — using third-party messengers is vital.”
A 2021 white paper from the World Wildlife Fund and two briefings from the Nature Conservancy in 2020 and 2024 discuss how to make the beef industry more climate-friendly by using improved grazing management and other techniques preferred by industry, to encourage carbon storage in the soil.
However, UN climate science experts recommended at least as far back as 2019 that tackling climate change would involve eating less meat. A recent Harvard Law School survey of climate experts, published in 2024, states that livestock-driven carbon emissions must drop 61 percent by 2036 to meet the Paris goals, driven by sharp cuts in production and consumption of meat.
In response to questions about the strategy document, Ruaraidh Petre, the Global Roundtable’s executive director, said the initiative’s members have “many diverse perspectives.”
“Collaboration and consensus is central to our work and reflects our shared values,” Petre said. “[The Roundtable] envisions a thriving food system in which the beef value chain is environmentally sound, socially responsible and economically viable.”
The Nature Conservancy said its work with the Roundtable has helped ensure that ranchers, businesses, and farming communities can adopt livestock practices that reduce carbon emissions, and restore and protect the environment in other ways as well.
“We see this collaboration with the beef industry as a vital element of our efforts to accelerate the shift towards a more regenerative food system and conserve native rangelands — which include grasslands — while safeguarding the cultural and economic well-being of those who rely on them,” the Nature Conservancy said in response to questions about its work with the Roundtable.
The World Wildlife Fund said it supports a mix of voluntary and market-based initiatives — backed by regulation — to make food production more sustainable. “WWF’s work on food and agricultural systems focuses on both reducing harmful over-consumption and promoting the adoption of nature-positive approaches to production,” a World Wildlife Fund spokesperson said.
Pro-meat PR
While advertising and public relations firms have come under growing scrutiny for their role in protecting the reputations of fossil fuel companies, the documents open a window into the similar role such agencies play with the meat industry.
MHP Group saw the use of third-party messengers as a core component of the “rules of influence” guiding its creation of a “new narrative” for beef, according to a 2020 Roundtable annual report.
During the campaign’s first year, the MHP Group placed 72 articles and seven interviews in seven “key markets,” mostly in Europe, Australia, and North America with messages such as the beef industry’s “continuous improvement across the globe,” according to the minutes of a 2022 Roundtable board meeting.
Other documents show that MHP Group supported the Roundtable’s preparations in the run-up to international summits. In particular, they suggest that MHP Group helped the organization to push back against the U.N.’s #ActNow campaign, a 2020 initiative to encourage people to eat more plant-based foods — a step recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to help slow global heating.
MHP Group also helped the Roundtable with reputation management, such as monitoring and responding to news coverage with a “negative skew” towards the Roundtable and the beef industry generally, according to a 2021 MHP Group briefing to Roundtable staff recorded in a video, which was reviewed by DeSmog.
In the video, a senior account manager at MHP Group, Daisy Hayward, shared MHP’s work in building up the Roundtable’s reputation on sustainability matters, including aims to present the group as a “trusted voice,” an “unbiased source of information” and a “really balanced organisation.” MHP Group Account Director Skye Buttenshaw emphasized the importance of “building faith in the notion of sustainable beef.”
Buttenshaw and Hayward did not respond to attempts to contact them via email and LinkedIn.
In March 2022, after nearly two years working with the Roundtable, MHP Group’s parent company — London-based Engine — was acquired by Next 15, which separated MHP Group into its own subsidiary.
A former Next15 employee told DeSmog that both Next15 and MHP had a “good ethical backbone,” and had been committed to improving the sustainability of their business, including by turning down projects with clients seen as harmful to the environment.
“I’m as curious as you are about the nature of that piece of work, as I personally would have had questions about that and I’m sure others would have too,” said the former employee, who declined to be named in order to protect their professional relationships.
The former employee said the project may have “slipped through the net” of the firms’ screening processes due to the relatively small size of the project compared to others, and the fact it was carried over in a merger.
“There are many sectors, such as dairy and meat, which are not being questioned to the same extent as more obviously contentious sectors, such as oil and gas,” the former employee said. “We were making big strides on that within Next15 at that time, but those conversations just need to happen more and more.”
In 2023, Next15 excluded work with fossil fuel clients, unless it is to help them “change the course of their business to make a positive impact.”
Roundtable documents show that in January 2023, the organization stopped working with MHP Group and took its communications in-house, while continuing to use third-party messengers to amplify its narratives. A 2024 work plan created by the Roundtable’s communications council advised members to use non-profit voices to help highlight industry “success stories” and emphasized the importance of using “trusted messengers.”
By April 2024, the Roundtable concluded that the industry had moved from a “defensive and cautious” position to a more positive one. Plant-based meat substitutes were “no longer believed to be the solution,” according to executive committee minutes, and policymakers “understand that improving sustainability in livestock can only be done through traditional livestock systems.”
Speaking at its global conference last year, Amie Peck, the co-chair of the Roundtable’s communications council, described a “real change from feeling like the industry is behind the times, and feeling like we’re being attacked on environmental footprint to feeling immense progress is being made.”
“We’re able to tell our story really effectively to policy-makers and regulators,” Peck said,” and are starting to get there on the consumer side too.”
The insights into MHP Group’s work with the Roundtable follow recent reporting by DeSmog that revealed how Red Flag, a Dublin-based public relations and lobbying firm, worked on behalf of a U.S.-based industry group to fuel an online backlash to a 2019 report by EAT-Lancet about sustainable diets, which stated that the U.S. and European Union should reduce red meat consumption by 80 to 90 percent.
Meat companies are also sending growing numbers of delegates to U.N. climate conferences, with a large meat industry turnout expected at November’s talks in Brazil. Eric Mittenthal of the Meat Institute (formerly the North American Meat Institute), the chief spokesperson for a global meat industry initiative called the Protein PACT, has suggested that non-profit partnerships can help industry be taken more seriously.
Growing Scrutiny
The Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund are among the world’s largest environmental groups, reporting $9 billion and $644 million in assets respectively in 2024. The lobbying push by the meat industry has led to renewed questions about their role as founding and ongoing members of the Roundtable.
The National Wildlife Federation, another founding and current member of the Roundtable, did not respond to a request for comment.
Other founding members of the Roundtable include trade groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Meat Institute. Both have lobbied fiercely against climate regulations worldwide and pushed back on calls for the beef industry to report its emissions or reduce production.
Advocates of this “multi-stakeholder” model argue that it brings together expertise from different sectors. Critics argue that the mixed membership of such groups helps to extend the industry’s already significant influence on government policy.
“They position themselves as a benevolent force, and as an inclusive and politically secular effort to bring diverse voices together,” said Ashka Naik, the chief research and policy officer at Boston-based campaign group Corporate Accountability, and co-author of a report on growing industry influence within the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. “But they often represent the interests of the most egregious and powerful private sector members.”
In 2014, both the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund contributed to the Roundtable’s “principles and criteria” for sustainable beef —which were condemned by dozens of environmental groups for lacking ambitious goals or binding requirements for the industry.
Currently, the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy continue to serve on Roundtable steering groups and boards, and collaborate on a range of pilot projects to lower livestock pollution.
Kari Hamerschlag, deputy director of the Food and Agriculture Program at Friends of the Earth, is among the environmentalists who are critical of these ties.
“When you have organizations like [the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy] advancing industry talking points and providing cover for weak and ineffective programs like the Global Roundtable on Sustainable Beef,” she said, “it undermines the work that other groups are doing to explain the harms of this industry and push for more meaningful change.”
Not Just Big Green Groups
While the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy have borne the brunt of criticism directed at environmentalists for participating in meat industry initiatives, the Roundtable’s 14 national branches have worked with dozens of smaller conservation groups to promote a vision for sustainable beef that doesn’t involve cutting production.
In 2022, ahead of a major U.N. biodiversity summit in Montréal, the Roundtable’s Canadian arm worked with Ducks Unlimited, Birds Canada, and the Nature Conservancy of Canada (not a part of the Nature Conservancy) to promote cattle ranching as beneficial for nature. A few days before the talks began, The Hill Times, a Canadian newspaper and website covering political news, published an op-ed co-authored by the Canadian Roundtable and Birds Canada that promoted beef’s purported benefits for the climate, claiming that rangelands have the potential to store vast amounts of carbon.
Birds Canada, Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy of Canada did not respond to requests for comment.
According to a study published last year in the journal Nature Communications, it is “not feasible” for the global livestock industry to sequester enough carbon to cancel out its climate impacts. The researchers found that 135 gigatons — or 135 billion metric tons — of carbon would need to be returned to soils to balance out the amount of methane emitted yearly by cattle, sheep, bison, and goats. According to University of Aberdeen climate scientist Pete Smith, a co-author of the study, this would be impossible since 135 gigatons is roughly equal to all the carbon that agriculture has drawn from the soil over the past 12,000 years.
Secchi, of the University of Iowa, said that partnerships between meat companies and nonprofits often highlight local conservation gains from certain forms of cattle ranching — such as positive impacts on certain species of wildlife — while failing to talk about wider, more destructive effects.
“They put this huge spotlight, with the help of [non-governmental organizations], on these marginally effective practices,” she said. “This is what I call the ‘positive-side-of-the-ledger’ approach, which Big Ag does a lot: Just focus your big spotlight on the positive stuff and completely ignore the overall system and the overall indicators.”
Additional reporting by Kathryn Clare.
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