Adjusting agricultural emissions for trade matters for climate change mitigation
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions in food systems is becoming more challenging as food is increasingly consumed away from producer regions, highlighting the need to consider emissions embodied in trade in agricultural emissions accounting. To address this, our study explores recent trends in trade-adjusted agricultural emissions of food items at the global, regional, and national levels. We find that emissions are largely dependent on a country’s consumption patterns and their agricultural emission intensities relative to their trading partners’. The absolute differences between the production-based and trade-adjusted emissions accounting approaches are especially apparent for major agricultural exporters and importers and where large shares of emission-intensive items such as ruminant meat, milk products and rice are involved. In relative terms, some low-income and emerging and developing economies with consumption of high emission intensity food products show large differences between approaches. Similar trends areReducing greenhouse gas emissions in food systems is becoming more challenging as food is increasingly consumed away from producer regions, highlighting the need to consider emissions embodied in trade in agricultural emissions accounting. To address this, our study explores recent trends in trade-adjusted agricultural emissions of food items at the global, regional, and national levels. We find that emissions are largely dependent on a country’s consumption patterns and their agricultural emission intensities relative to their trading partners’. The absolute differences between the production-based and trade-adjusted emissions accounting approaches are especially apparent for major agricultural exporters and importers and where large shares of emission-intensive items such as ruminant meat, milk products and rice are involved. In relative terms, some low-income and emerging and developing economies with consumption of high emission intensity food products show large differences between approaches. Similar trends are also found under various specifications that account for trade and re-exports differently. These findings could serve as an important element towards constructing national emissions reduction targets that consider trading partners, leading to more effective emissions reductions overall.…
Author details: | Adrian FoongORCiDGND, Prajal PradhanORCiDGND, Oliver Frör, Jürgen P. KroppORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30607-x |
ISSN: | 2041-1723 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35680858 |
Title of parent work (English): | Nature Communications |
Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2022/06/09 |
Publication year: | 2022 |
Release date: | 2024/05/24 |
Volume: | 13 |
Issue: | 1 |
Article number: | 3024 |
Number of pages: | 10 |
Funding institution: | German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) [01DP17035,; 01LS1906A] |
Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Geowissenschaften |
DDC classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 55 Geowissenschaften, Geologie / 550 Geowissenschaften |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
DOAJ gelistet | |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |