Pre- and Post-Production Processes Increasingly Dominate Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Agri-Food Systems

Source-supplied abstract

We present results from the FAOSTAT emissions shares database, covering emissions from agri-food systems and their shares to total anthropogenic emissions for 196 countries and 40 territories for the period 1990–2019. We find that in 2019, global agri-food system emissions were 16.5 (95 %; CI range: 11–22) billion metric tonnes (GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)), corresponding to 31%(range: 19 %–43 %) of total anthropogenic emissions. Of the agri-food system total, global emissions within the farm gate – from crop and livestock production processes including on-farm energy use – were 7.2 GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1); emissions from land use change, due to deforestation and peatland degradation, were 3.5 GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1); and emissions from pre- and post-production processes – manufacturing of fertilizers, food processing, packaging, transport, retail, household consumption and food waste disposal – were 5.8 GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1). Over the study period 1990–2019, agri-food system emissions increased in total by 17 %, largely driven by a doubling of emissions from pre- and post-production processes. Conversely, the FAOSTAT data show that since 1990 land use emissions decreased by 25 %, while emissions within the farm gate increased 9 %. In 2019, in terms of individual greenhouse gases (GHGs), pre- and postproduction processes emitted the most CO2 (3.9 GtCO2 yr(exp -1)), preceding land use change (3.3 GtCO2 yr(exp -1)) and farm gate (1.2 GtCO2 yr(exp -1)) emissions. Conversely, farm gate activities were by far the major emitter of methane (140 MtCH4 yr(exp -1)) and of nitrous oxide (7.8 MtN2Oyr(exp -1)). Pre- and post-production processes were also significant emitters of methane (49 MtCH4 yr(exp -1)), mostly generated from the decay of solid food waste in landfills and open dumps. One key trend over the 30-year period since 1990 highlighted by our analysis is the increasingly important role of food-related emissions generated outside of agricultural land, in pre- and post-production processes along the agri-food system, at global, regional and national scales. In fact, our data show that by 2019, pre- and post-production processes had overtaken farm gate processes to become the largest GHG component of agri-food system emissions in Annex I parties (2.2 GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)). They also more than doubled in non-Annex I parties (to 3.5 GtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)), becoming larger than emissions from land use change. By 2019 food supply chains had become the largest agri-food system component in China (1100 MtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)), the USA (700 MtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)) and the EU-27 (600 MtCO2 eq. yr(exp -1)). This has important repercussions for food-relevant national mitigation strategies, considering that until recently these have focused mainly on reductions of non-CO2 gases within the farm gate and on CO2 mitigation from land use change. The information used in this work is available as open data with DOI https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5615082 (Tubiello et al., 2021d). It is also available to users via the FAOSTAT database (https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/EM; FAO, 2021a), with annual updates.

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