A High-Powered Study Confirming the Misleading Nature of the Dublin Declaration

In November 2024, Environmental Science & Policy published our critical review of the Dublin Declaration, a document promoting animal farming (Krattenmacher et al., 2024). We found the content of the Dublin Declaration to be scientifically problematic in several ways. For example, the Declaration neglects key issues such as meat overconsumption in high-income countries and the dominance of industrial animal production, which downplays the industry’s impacts on health and environment and results in a highly industry-friendly document. In addition, we identified “several academically questionable practices, including denial of credentials to dissenting actors, omission of significant conflicts of interest, and excessive self-edition and self-citation, all while purporting to provide a scientific and balanced overview” (Krattenmacher et al., 2024). Two of the six original authors of the Declaration, as well as three additional authors, have responded to our analysis (Belk et al., 2025). Here, we respond to their main criticisms.