I mapped out plant based food spots in my neighborhood this week and wrote that agriculture accounts for 25 percent of global emissions as the reason it mattered. I want to correct that number, because the real one is actually worse, and I’d been underselling my own argument.
The most cited research on this comes from a team led by Francesco Tubiello, a senior statistician at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, working with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Their 2021 study, published in Nature Food, built a database called EDGAR-FOOD that tracks emissions from every stage of the food system, not just farms, but transport, packaging, retail, and waste too. Their finding, food systems were responsible for 34 percent of global human caused greenhouse gas emissions in 2015. That’s a third of everything, not a quarter, and it counts the full chain, not just what happens on a farm.
The FAO has continued using a similar figure since, describing food systems as responsible for roughly one third of global anthropogenic emissions in more recent statements. An earlier 2019 IPCC special report put the range even wider, estimating food systems could account for anywhere between 21 and 37 percent of total emissions depending on how the accounting is done, since methodology varies by what gets counted as part of the food system versus a separate sector like energy or industry.
Within that total, the breakdown matters too. About 71 percent of food related emissions in the 2021 study traced back to agriculture itself and the land use changes tied to it, deforestation to clear cropland or pasture being the biggest single piece. The rest came from retail, transport, consumption, and food processing further down the chain, categories that don’t show up when people picture agriculture as just a farm and a tractor.
There’s actually a small piece of good news buried in the trend line. Tubiello’s data found the food system’s share of total emissions has been gradually declining over time, from 44 percent back in 1990 down to 34 percent in 2015, even as the absolute tonnage of food emissions kept rising. Other sectors, mainly energy, have been growing faster than food emissions have, which is a different kind of progress than actual reduction, but it’s not nothing either.
None of this changes the plant based food map I made. If anything it strengthens the case, since the real number is bigger than what I originally cited. I’d rather undersell my own point by accident than get caught inflating it. Turns out I did the opposite without meaning to.
Sources. Tubiello, F. et al., UN FAO / European Commission Joint Research Centre, published in Nature Food (2021); IPCC special report (2019).