Ex Ante Emergy Synthesis of Cultivated Meat: Sustainability Insights and Benchmarks Against Conventional Systems

Cultivated meat emerges as a promising alternative to conventional meat, the production of which causes significant environmental pressure, including greenhouse gas emissions, water demand, and pasture expansion, alongside ethical concerns related to animal slaughter. Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) often highlight reductions in these impacts for cultivated meat, but they typically adopt a technocentric perspective, omitting flows of renewable natural resources and human labor. In this context, emergy (with an “m”) environmental accounting offers a valuable methodological complement to LCA, incorporating biophysical and systemic perspectives for a more holistic analysis. The objective of this study is to apply emergy accounting to a cultivated meat production system. The results indicate that cultivated meat exhibits a Unit Emergy Value (UEV) of 0.43 × 1013 sej/kg-meat, which is up to 13 times lower than that of conventional meat, thereby indicating a higher emergy efficiency. However, it still depends heavily on economic resources (71.1% of the total emergy). As a result, it presents low emergy yield (EYR of 1.41), high environmental load (ELR of 6.97), low renewability (12.5%), and an emergy sustainability index (ESI) of 0.20 (ESI < 1 denotes unsustainability), thus indicating that the system is unsustainable at its current technological stage. Compared to conventional livestock systems, particularly extensive systems with greater integration of natural resources, cultivated meat presents one of the poorest emergy performances due to its highly artificial energy and material basis, which is dependent on non-renewable resource inputs. These findings contrast with the optimistic conclusions from LCA studies, emphasizing the inferiority of cultivated meat in emergy terms and the need for complementary approaches to generate broader diagnostics. The analysis also identifies optimization opportunities, such as resource input substitution and the integration of renewables, aiming for greater sustainability in protein production.