Big Food's climate change footprint has likely been hugely understated

It's on the profits way, way over people system.

For nearly three decades, nations have reported greenhouse gas emissions inventories to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty aimed at stabilizing the climate. The idea is that by tracking emissions across sectors, the inventories reveal where climate action is most urgently needed. The food system encompasses much more than agriculture, and yet under the reporting guidelines set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), many other factors—such as packaging, transportation, disposal, and agriculture-driven deforestation—haven’t been tallied together. And for that reason, the food system’s overall share of emissions has long been underestimated.

A new analysis aims to change that. Experts from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York University, and Columbia University have developed an accounting system to capture the food system’s overall role in the climate crisis.

Their paper, recently published in Environmental Research Letters, found that the global food system was responsible for 16 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2018, or a third of all global emissions that year. This is a sharp contrast to the more narrowly defined agriculture sector of the IPCC’s categories for greenhouse gas inventories, which accounted for 5.3 billion metric tons in 2018, or just a tenth of the total. - Civil Eats