TY - JOUR
T1 - Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods
AU - Xu, Xiaoming
AU - Sharma, Prateek
AU - Shu, Shijie
AU - Lin, Tzu-Shun
AU - Ciais, Philippe
AU - Tubiello, Francesco N.
AU - Smith, Pete
AU - Campbell, Nelson
AU - Jain, Atul K.
N1 - This research is partly supported by the US Department of Energy (number DE-SC0016323). The map figures in the main text and the Supplementary Information were created using Matplotlib Basemap Toolkit of Python.
PY - 2021/9
Y1 - 2021/9
N2 - Agriculture and land use are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but previous estimates were either highly aggregate or provided spatial details for subsectors obtained via different methodologies. Using a model–data integration approach that ensures full consistency between subsectors, we provide spatially explicit estimates of production- and consumption-based GHG emissions worldwide from plant- and animal-based human food in circa 2010. Global GHG emissions from the production of food were found to be 17,318 ± 1,675 TgCO2eq yr−1, of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food (including livestock feed), 29% to plant-based foods and 14% to other utilizations. Farmland management and land-use change represented major shares of total emissions (38% and 29%, respectively), whereas rice and beef were the largest contributing plant- and animal-based commodities (12% and 25%, respectively), and South and Southeast Asia and South America were the largest emitters of production-based GHGs.
AB - Agriculture and land use are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but previous estimates were either highly aggregate or provided spatial details for subsectors obtained via different methodologies. Using a model–data integration approach that ensures full consistency between subsectors, we provide spatially explicit estimates of production- and consumption-based GHG emissions worldwide from plant- and animal-based human food in circa 2010. Global GHG emissions from the production of food were found to be 17,318 ± 1,675 TgCO2eq yr−1, of which 57% corresponds to the production of animal-based food (including livestock feed), 29% to plant-based foods and 14% to other utilizations. Farmland management and land-use change represented major shares of total emissions (38% and 29%, respectively), whereas rice and beef were the largest contributing plant- and animal-based commodities (12% and 25%, respectively), and South and Southeast Asia and South America were the largest emitters of production-based GHGs.
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U2 - 10.1038/s43016-021-00358-x
DO - 10.1038/s43016-021-00358-x
M3 - Article
SN - 2662-1355
VL - 2
SP - 724
EP - 732
JO - Nature Food
JF - Nature Food
IS - 9
ER -