English: Where do the emissions from our food come from?

In the visualization we see GHG emissions from 29 different food products – from beef at the top to nuts at the bottom.

For each product you can see from which stage in the supply chain its emissions originate. This extends from land use changes on the left, through to transport and packaging on the right.

This is data from the largest meta-analysis of global food systems to date, published in Science by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018).

In this study, the authors looked at data across more than 38,000 commercial farms in 119 countries.2

In this comparison we look at the total GHG emissions per kilogram of food product. CO2 is the most important GHG, but not the only one – agriculture is a large source of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. To capture all GHG emissions from food production researchers therefore express them in kilograms of ‘carbon dioxide equivalents’. This metric takes account not just CO2 but all greenhouse gases.3

The most important insight from this study: there are massive differences in the GHG emissions of different foods: producing a kilogram of beef emits 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalents). While peas emits just 1 kilogram per kg.