What happens to the Earth as the world's plates change?
Drag the slider — or press Run simulation — to move the world from today's non-plant-based diets toward plant-based eating, and watch the landscape, the numbers and the ocean respond. Every endpoint in this model comes from the cited research below.
The dials of a changing planet
Each dial interpolates between today's baseline (0% plant-based) and the best estimate for a fully plant-based world from the cited studies. "Up to" values are maxima reported in the research.
The world's farmland in this simulation
Today, about 80% of all farmland grazes livestock or grows their feed.[6] As the world shifts plant-based, the model converts that land to crops for people and land returned to nature.
Agriculture — dominated by animal farming and feed crops — is the biggest cause of habitat destruction worldwide; extinctions now run at ≥1,000× the natural rate.[15][16]
One person inside this world
A high-meat eater's dietary environmental impact = 100. A vegan's is just 30 (Nature Food, 55,000+ UK consumers).[4] The bar follows the simulation slider for an average person.
Eating like a high-meat consumer.
one 250 g portion a day: beef at 15,400 L/kg vs lentils at 1,250 L/kg[10][11]1.41M L
And the ocean responds
Excess nitrogen and phosphorus running off farmland — including livestock operations and their feed crops — is the main cause of ocean dead zones (US EPA); the Gulf dead zone returns every summer at ≈6,500 sq miles.[13][14] In the scene above, the dead zone shrinks as feed-crop runoff falls — a qualitative effect of cutting its main cause. Separately, 35.4% of marine fish stocks are overfished[18] and bottom trawling releases as much carbon yearly as global aviation[19] — pressures a plant-based world removes from the menu entirely, along with the bycatch of dolphins, turtles, whales and seabirds.[20]
How the simulation works (assumptions)
The slider linearly interpolates between two states built only from the source data: 0% = today's baseline (livestock = 7.1 Gt CO₂e/yr and 14.5% of human-caused emissions; 80% of farmland for livestock; animal agriculture using ~⅓ of fresh water; high-meat personal impact = 100). 100% = a fully plant-based world using the maximum reductions reported in the research (−70% food-system GHG; −76% land per person; −67.4% water footprint; +49% food supply; personal impact = 30; personal GHG −61%). Livestock activity, runoff, smoke, herd size and the dead zone scale with remaining demand — a simplification, since real systems respond non-linearly. Forest regrowth and the dead zone are qualitative animations of cited causal links (land freed; runoff reduced), not quantitative projections.