An emerging study found that Buddhists in China offset an estimated 40 million tons of greenhouse gas emission annually by eating a vegetarian diet. The figure is equivalent to the 7.2 percent and 9.2 percent of all the greenhouse gases produce by the UK and France, respectively, each year.

The study, entitled "Reduction of Greenhouse-Gas Emissions by Chinese Buddhists with Vegetarian Diets: A Quantitative Assessment" suggested that the environmental benefits encourage more Buddhists to take up vegetarianism. The practice, contrary to popular notions, is not a universal tenet of Buddhism, although teachers highly encouraged it, Lions Roar reported.

In Tibetan Buddhism, more and more are going vegetarian and favored of eliminating animals from one's diet including Kagyu school head and dubbed by the media as the "world's happiest man" Buddhist monk Matthieu Richard.  

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, animal-food production contributes 7.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year, accounting for 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gases produced by humans.

Moreover, the industry eats 30 percent of the Earth's land mass. At least 70 percent of the grain grown in the US are fed to food animals, and runoff from factory farming also created 230 "dead zones" in the US east coast. Based on Mercy for Animals, producing a pound of animal protein requires "12 times as much land, 13 times as much fossil fuels, and 15 times as much water as it does to produce one pound of soy protein."

But other than its environmental effects, the moral imperative of Buddhism is compassion, and the process how these food animals are treated in factory is considered brutal.

"Eliminating or at least minimizing one's consumption of meat is an expression of compassion," Narayan Helen Liebenson said in an article tackling the subject.

The study, authored by Ampere A. Tseng from Arizona State University, was published in the Journal of Contemporary Buddhism.