New article in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems: Environmental Insights from a Review of Global Broiler Chicken Production

Fangzhou Li, Prof. Ilias Tagkopoulos, and collaborators (led by Dr. Derrick Risner, with Prof. Justin B. Siegel, Dr. Mariana Barboza Gardner, and Prof. Edward S. Spang) published Birds of a feather: environmental insights from a review of global broiler chicken production in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems on 6/9/2026.

About this work: How green is your chicken? This meta-analysis pulls together 57 broiler-chicken life cycle assessments, 173 individual assessments in all, to ask how environmental impact varies by production type and region, and finds the answers are messier than common intuition suggests. Conventional and organic/free-range systems showed no significant difference in global warming potential, yet organic/free-range production carried significantly higher acidification and eutrophication, a “greener label, dirtier runoff” paradox. Impacts also split sharply by geography: American production emitted less than European, which in turn far outperformed Asian production, while no peer-reviewed assessment could be found for mainland Africa despite its substantial output. Underneath it all, the review exposes a methodological tangle of 25 different functional units and more than 90 inconsistently reported impact categories that make cross-study comparison hard and point to where standardization is most needed.

Reference: Risner, Derrick, Fangzhou Li, Justin B. Siegel, Ilias Tagkopoulos, Mariana Barboza Gardner, and Edward S. Spang. “Birds of a feather: environmental insights from a review of global broiler chicken production.” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems (2026). doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1641029