What is our assessment?

Based on our analysis, evidence suggests that insect farming offers minimal opportunities for emission reductions and more often replaces lower-emitting foods, while also facing high costs, low consumer acceptance, and several significant risks even at small industrial scales. For these reasons, insect farming is “Not Recommended” as a climate solution.

What is it?

This potential climate solution involves industrially farming insects, such as crickets, mealworms, and black soldier fly larvae, in controlled facilities to produce protein with lower resource use and lower climate impact for human consumption, livestock feed, or pet food. Currently, two billion people worldwide have a practice of eating insects for food, but industrial insect farming is a relatively new effort, even though one trillion insects are estimated to be farmed each year, with roughly 79–84 billion insects alive on farms at any given time globally. Most farmed insects are processed into powders, flours, and oils for snack foods, pet food, or animal feed. This solution does not include industrial insect farming for the production of honey, shellac, silk, or the use of insect waste as fertilizer.

Does it work?

Insects convert feed efficiently, grow quickly, can eat food waste, and require far less land than livestock, especially cattle, creating possible pathways for low-resource protein. However, recent analyses show highly variable and often high life cycle emissions, 4.2–25.8 kg CO₂‑eq per kg of protein for insects as human food, with the upper end of this range approaching the lower bound for beef. The emissions intensity of insect-based livestock feeds varies from 2.8–11 kg CO₂‑eq per kg dry matter and is higher than for soybean meal (1.06–2.26 kg CO₂‑eq per kg dry matter). Insect proteins for pet food are 2–10 times more emissions-intensive than conventional pet foods that often use meat-industry by-products. Industrial farms in colder, fossil-fuel-dependent regions show especially high footprints, with one United Kingdom industrial life cycle assessment (LCA) reporting emissions nearly 10 times those of a medium-sized farm in Thailand.

Why are we excited?

Insect farming has advantages over some widely produced foods, especially beef and pork, most notably that it requires far less land and feed. On average, insects require about 2 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of body mass, which is approximately 3–5 times more efficient than cattle and comparable to chickens. Many edible insects are also high in protein and provide micronutrients like iron, zinc, and B vitamins. There is active research focused on reducing energy needs, breeding native species, and exploring the use of mixed human food waste as feed to better position insects as a potential climate solution.

Why are we concerned?

Overall, insect farming today has limited climate benefits, poor substitution of high-impact foods, significant local ecosystem risks, low consumer uptake, and high costs.

Most LCAs for insect farming are based on small-scale operations rather than industrial scales. Furthermore, common assumptions in insect farming research do not align with current industry practices, including overstated use of food waste as feed and reliance on outdated climate and price projections. While insect farming could plausibly displace some high-impact foods in the future, there is no current pathway for insects to replace pig and cattle products, a prerequisite for meaningful GHG emission reductions. Substituting insects for already low-impact foods such as flour or cereal ingredients, as is currently common, increases emissions. In addition, available insect products have limited sensory or textural similarities to meat compared with plant-based alternatives. Despite more than US$1 billion invested in scaling the sector, consumer acceptance remains low, with only 5% of production going to direct human consumption and 50% to the pet food market.

Industrial insect farming also carries serious risks. Research indicates that escapes of non-native species disrupting local ecosystems are inevitable and will intensify as operations scale, potentially affecting other food production systems. Crowded, warm rearing environments can also act as disease-spreading vectors, even if insect farming’s direct zoonotic risk to humans is likely lower than that of intensive meat production. Over 80% of small insect farms supplying pet food have been found to contain parasites, with roughly a third carrying species capable of infecting humans or animals. Contamination risks persist when using mixed human food waste as insect feed due to potential pathogens and chemical residues, which regulatory frameworks are still working to assess.

Lastly, costs are a major barrier. The most comprehensive economic model to date finds that insects are unlikely to become a viable part of industrial animal feed in the near future. Insects are also not expected to reach price parity with meat before plant-based or even single-cell/fermentation-derived proteins. Claims of future cost competitiveness rely on assumptions of near-total utilization of food waste.