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Senin, 20 Juni 2022

Global food-miles account for nearly 20% of total food-systems emissions - Nature.com

Abstract

Food trade plays a key role in achieving global food security. With a growing consumer demand for diverse food products, transportation has emerged as a key link in food supply chains. We estimate the carbon footprint of food-miles by using a global multi-region accounting framework. We calculate food-miles based on the countries and sectors of origin and the destination countries, and distinguish the relevant international and domestic transport distances and commodity masses. When the entire upstream food supply chain is considered, global food-miles correspond to about 3.0 GtCO2e (3.5–7.5 times higher than previously estimated), indicating that transport accounts for about 19% of total food-system emissions (stemming from transport, production and land-use change). Global freight transport associated with vegetable and fruit consumption contributes 36% of food-miles emissions—almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases released during their production. To mitigate the environmental impact of food, a shift towards plant-based foods must be coupled with more locally produced items, mainly in affluent countries.

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Fig. 1: Overview of domestic, international and global food-miles, food-miles emissions and food-production emissions by sectors.
Fig. 2: Top bilateral flows of international trade flows associated with global food consumption.
Fig. 3: Examples of supply chains terminating in red meat consumption by households in China.
Fig. 4: Global food-miles emissions broken down by countries/regions.
Fig. 5: Sectoral breakdown of food-miles and the related emissions resulting from international and domestic trade.
Fig. 6: Production layer decomposition (PLD) of food-miles emissions.

Data availability

Data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its Supplementary Information files, or are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes developed for the analyses and to generate results are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Australian Research Council (projects DP0985522, DP130101293, DP190102277, LE160100066, DP200102585, DP200103005, LP200100311, IH190100009) and the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources project, through the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory infrastructure VL 201. We thank S. Juraszek for expertly managing the Global IELab’s advanced computation requirements, and C. Jarabak for help with collecting data

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISA, School of Physics A28, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Mengyu Li, Manfred Lenzen, Arunima Malik, Liyuan Wei & Yutong Jin

  2. School of E-business and Logistics, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China

    Nanfei Jia

  3. Discipline of Accounting, Sydney Business School, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Arunima Malik

  4. School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Liyuan Wei

  5. Charles Perkins Centre & School of Life and Environmental Sciences, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    David Raubenheimer

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Contributions

M. Lenzen designed the study. M. Li conducted the analyses. M. Li, L.W., N.J. and Y.J. contributed to data collection. M. Li, D.R., M. Lenzen and A.M. wrote the paper. All authors contributed to data interpretation and manuscript editing.

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Correspondence to Arunima Malik.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Food thanks Prajal Pradhan, Pekka Kinnunen and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–6 and Figs. 1–12.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data

Australian National Accounts: Input–Output Tables

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Source Data Fig. 2

Source data for Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 4

Source data for Fig. 4.

Source Data Fig. 5

Source data for Fig. 5.

Source Data Fig. 6

Source data for Fig. 6.

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Li, M., Jia, N., Lenzen, M. et al. Global food-miles account for nearly 20% of total food-systems emissions. Nat Food (2022). https://ift.tt/c27nYkP

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