Greenhouse gas emissions across the food supply chain

The visualization shows GHG emissions from 29 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 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 examined data from more than 38,000 commercial farms in 119 countries.

In this comparison, we look at the total GHG emissions per kilogram of food products. 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 express them in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents. This metric takes into account not just CO2 but all greenhouse gases.

See the full article here.