Shipping ingredients and food products account for about one-fifth of all carbon dioxide emissions from a larger piece of emission pie than previously thought, according to the first complete carbon footprint of the global carbon footprint. Clearing the farm, plowing and transporting food to and from stores adds to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The United Nations estimates that growth, processing, and packaging of food accounts for about one third of all emissions. This has led to an explosion of research into how food systems affect the climate, from creating devastating changes in land use to releasing greenhouse gases, said Jason Hill, an environmental scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.
But the complexity of the food system has made it difficult to measure how much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a direct result of systemic emissions, especially those of travel. In the past, many studies have slowed down carbon emissions because they focused only on what was produced by moving a single product such as a chocolate bar to and from the store. This method often misses a lot of other trucks, ships and planes involved in collecting all the ingredients needed to make a bar in the first place, says Li.
In hopes of closing the gap, Mengyu Li, a sustainability researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia, and his colleagues collected data from 74 countries and regions, and looked at where food came from, where it went and how it came from. in the next. They found that, in 2017, food shipments added 3.0 gigatonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, up to 7.5 times more than previously estimated (see ‘Food transportation and production emissions’). Rich nations were obliged to produce about half of the world’s population gas emissions for food transport, despite accounting for about 12% of the world’s population. Low-income countries with about half the world’s population producing only 20% of food imports.
This difference is partly due to the fact that rich countries are more likely to buy food from around the world. They also use the refrigerator when delivering fresh fruit and vegetables, which are high in carbon. Fruits and vegetables produce twice the amount of CO2 produced by growing them. But the results do not mean that people should try to reduce the amount of plants in their diet, says Nina Domingo, a sustainability researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Numerous studies have shown that plant-based foods are better for the environment than eating more red meat, because livestock require more land and emit greenhouse gases. Reducing the consumption of red meat and eating locally produced foods could help rich countries reduce the impact of climate change, say researchers.
Source Journal Reference : Freda Kreier, Transporting food generates whopping amounts of carbon dioxide, Nature News (2022), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01766-0
