Would going vegan even make a dent globally?
Short answer: Yes, the biggest dent on offer. A plant-based world needs 75% less farmland, freeing an area the size of the US, China, the EU and Australia combined.
The freed land, about 3 billion hectares, is on the scale of the US, China, the EU and Australia combined.
Poore & Nemecek (2018)
The objection
“Even if it’s right in theory, I’m one person among eight billion. It won’t make a dent.”
The answer
Take the question literally. Poore & Nemecek (2018) modelled a global shift to plant-based eating: farmland falls from roughly 4 billion to 1 billion hectares, a 75% reduction, freeing land on the scale of the United States, China, the European Union and Australia combined. That is the largest single change available to humanity’s footprint on the planet’s surface.
The freed land does more than sit there saved. Hayek et al. (2021) estimated the carbon opportunity cost of animal agriculture: if the land it occupies regrew as native vegetation, it would draw down hundreds of gigatonnes of CO2, equivalent to years of total global fossil emissions. Rewilding livestock land is one of the largest natural carbon-removal options that exists.
Now for the part that cuts the other way. You, individually, will not move those totals. Neither does any single vote, vaccination or recycled bottle, yet aggregates are made of nothing else. Your choice removes a real, measurable slice of demand, shifts the signals markets actually read, and normalises the change for everyone watching you eat.
So split the question properly. Could collective change make a dent? The biggest one on the table. Is your choice part of that? It is exactly one honest unit of it. The only “everyone” that ever changed anything started as someone.