Agriculture exerts a significant environmental influence in three primary ways.
First, it demands vast quantities of fresh water, which creates substantial environmental strain in areas already facing water scarcity. Beyond consuming water as an input, the sector pollutes rivers, lakes, and oceans through the discharge of nutrients.
It serves as a major catalyst for climate change, accounting for approximately one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Finally, agriculture leaves a massive footprint on the global environment due to its extensive land requirements. Half of the world’s habitable land is dedicated to agricultural purposes.
Large swaths of the planet that were once covered by forests and wildlands have been converted for farming. This loss of natural habitat has been the primary driver behind the decline in global biodiversity. Wildlife populations can recover if we reduce the amount of land used for agriculture and allow natural ecosystems to restore themselves.
Ensuring that everyone has access to a nutritious, sustainable diet remains one of our most significant challenges. On this page, you can find our data, visualizations, and analysis regarding the environmental impacts of food.
Key insights on the Environmental Impacts of Food
Food production has a large environmental impact in several ways
What are the environmental impacts of food and agriculture?
The visualization here shows a summary of some of the main global impacts:
Food production accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Habitable land is defined as land that is free of ice and desert.
70% of global freshwater withdrawals are utilized by agriculture.
78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication is caused by agriculture. Eutrophication refers to the pollution of waterways with nutrient-rich water.
94% of non-human mammal biomass consists of livestock. This means that livestock outweigh wild mammals by a factor of 15-to-1. This share rises to 97% when considering only land-based mammals.
71% of bird biomass is comprised of poultry livestock. This means poultry outweigh wild birds by a factor of more than 3-to-1.
Addressing what we eat and how we produce our food is essential to mitigating climate change, reducing water stress and pollution, restoring forests and grasslands, and protecting global wildlife.
Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture
Approximately half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture. Habitable land is defined as land that is free of ice and desert, as illustrated in the visualization.
Agricultural land is the total of pasture used for livestock grazing and cropland used for direct human consumption and animal feed.
Consequently, agriculture is the world’s largest land user, occupying more area than forests or wild grasslands.
Three-quarters of this agricultural land is dedicated to livestock, which includes both pasture and cropland used for animal feed. This provides the world with only 18% of its total calories and 37% of its protein. The remaining quarter of the land is used for crops for human consumption, which provide the majority of the world’s calories and protein.
More than three-quarters of global agricultural land is used for livestock, even though meat and dairy represent a much smaller portion of the world’s protein and calorie intake.
What you should know about this data
Other studies identify similar distributions of global land: in an analysis of how human activity has transformed global land use in recent centuries, Ellis et al. (2010) found that by 2000, 55% of Earth’s ice-free land had been converted into cropland, pasture, and urban areas. This left only 45% as ‘natural’ or ‘semi-natural’ land.
The study by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018) estimates that 43% of ice- and desert-free land is used for agriculture. 83% of this is used for animal-
The variation in these figures is often due to uncertainty regarding the size of ‘rangelands.’ Rangelands consist of grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands, and deserts that are grazed by domestic livestock or wild animals. The intensity of grazing on rangelands can vary significantly, making it difficult to accurately quantify how much is used for grazing and, by extension, food production.
However, as the review above demonstrated, despite this uncertainty, most analyses converge on an estimate that nearly half of habitable land is used for agriculture.
Food is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s emissions
Food systems are responsible for around one-quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions.
This includes emissions from land-use changes, on-farm production, processing, transport, packaging, and retail.
We can categorize these food system emissions into four broad areas:
30% of food emissions come directly from livestock and fisheries. Ruminant livestock—primarily cattle—produce methane through their digestive processes. Manure and pasture management are also included in this category.
1% comes from wild fisheries, most of which is attributed to fuel consumption by fishing vessels.
Crop production accounts for approximately one-quarter of food emissions. This includes crops for both human consumption and animal feed.
Land use accounts for 24% of food emissions. Twice as many emissions result from land use for livestock (16%) as for crops for human consumption (8%).
Finally, supply chains account for 18% of food emissions. This includes food processing, distribution, transport, packaging, and retail.
Other studies estimate that an even larger fraction—up to one-third—of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from food production. These differences arise from the inclusion of non-food agricultural products, such as textiles, biofuels, and industrial crops, as well as uncertainties regarding food waste and land-use emissions.
Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions
One-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions result from food and agriculture. What are the main contributors to food’s emissions?
How much of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food?
Estimates of food emissions range from one-quarter to one-third. Where do these differences come from?
Them Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), published in Science. This dataset is based on information from 38,700 commercially
Environmental impacts are calculated based on life-cycle analyses that consider impacts across the supply chain, including land-use change, on-farm emissions, the production of agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, food processing, transport, packaging, and retail.
Greenhouse gas emissions are measured in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2eq). This means each greenhouse gas is weighted by its global warming potential value. Global warming potential measures the amount of warming a gas creates compared to CO2. In this study, CO2eq and warming effects are measured over a 100-year timescale (GWP100).
Emissions from food alone would take us past 1.5°C or 2°C this century
One-quarter to one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems. The remainder comes from energy.
While energy and industry contribute more than food, we must address both sectors to effectively combat climate change.
Michael Clark and colleagues modeled the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by food systems this century across a range of scenarios.
In a business-as-usual scenario, the authors expect the world to emit approximately 1356 billion tonnes of CO2-we by 2100.
As the visualization shows, this would take us well beyond the carbon budget for 1.5°C—we would emit two to three times more than this budget. It would also consume almost our entire budget for 2°C.
Ignoring food emissions is not an option if we intend to meet our international climate targets.
Even if we were to stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow—an impossibility—we would still exceed our 1.5°C target and nearly miss our 2°C target.
Emissions from food alone could use up all of our budget for 1.5°C or 2°C—but we have a range of opportunities to avoid this
If we want to meet our global climate targets, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food. What options do we have?
Them Michael Clark et al. (2020), published in Science
Their ‘business-as-usual’ projection makes the following assumptions: the global population increases in line with the UN’s medium fertility scenario; per capita diets change as people around the world become wealthier (shifting toward more diverse diets with more meat and dairy); crop yields continue to increase in line with historical improvements; and rates of food loss and the emissions intensity of food production remain constant.
This is measured in global warming potential CO2 warming-equivalents (CO2-we). This accounts for the range of greenhouse gases, not just CO2, but also others such as methane and nitrous oxide. We examine the differences in greenhouse gas metrics at the end of our article on the carbon footprint of foods.
What we eat matters much more than how far it has traveled
‘Eat local’ is a common recommendation for reducing the carbon footprint of your diet. However, it is often a misguided one.
Transport tends to be a small part of a food’s carbon footprint. Globally, transport accounts for just 5% of food system emissions. Most of food’s emissions originate from land-use changes and production on the farm.
Since transport emissions are typically small, and the differences between foods are large, the types of food we eat matter much more than how far they have traveled. Locally produced beef will have a much larger footprint than peas, regardless of whether it is shipped across continents.
The visualization illustrates this.
Producing a kilogram of beef, for example, emits 60 kilograms of greenhouse gases (CO2-equivalents). The production of a kilogram of peas, shown at the bottom of the chart, emits just 1 kilogram of greenhouse gases. Whether the beef or peas are produced locally will have little impact on the difference between these two foods.
The reason transport accounts for such a small share of emissions is that most internationally traded food travels by boat, not by plane. Very little food is air-freighted; it accounts for only 0.16% of food miles. For the few products that are transported by air, the emissions can be very high: flying emits 50 times more CO2eq than boat per tonne-kilometer.
Unlike air freight, shipping food over long distances by boat emits only small amounts of carbon. A classic example of traded food is avocados. Shipping one kilogram of avocados from Mexico to the United Kingdom would generate 0.21kg CO2eq in transport emissions. This is only around 8% of the avocados’ total footprint.
Even when shipped over great distances, these emissions are much lower than those of locally produced animal products.
You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
“Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce your diet’s carbon footprint. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it comes from?
Meat and dairy foods tend to have a higher carbon footprint
When we compare the carbon footprint of different types of foods, a clear hierarchy emerges.
Meat and dairy products tend to emit more greenhouse gases than plant-based foods. This holds true whether we compare on the basis of mass (per kilogram), per kilocalorie, or per gram of protein, as shown in the chart.
Within meat and dairy products, there is also a consistent pattern: larger animals tend to be less efficient and have a higher footprint. Beef typically has the largest emissions, followed by lamb, pork, chicken, and then eggs and fish.
This data presents global average values. For some foods—such as beef—there are large differences depending on where it is produced and the farming practices used. Nonetheless, the lowest-carbon beef and lamb still have a higher carbon footprint than most plant-based foods.
Them Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), published in Science. This dataset covers 38,700 commercially
Greenhouse gas emissions are measured in carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2eq). This means each greenhouse gas is weighted by its global warming potential value. Global warming potential measures the amount of warming a gas creates compared to CO2. For CO2eq, this is measured over a 100-year timescale (GWP100).
There are also large differences in the carbon footprint of the same foods
The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the food system is to change what we eat.
Adopting a more plant-based diet by reducing our consumption of carbon-intensive foods such as meat and dairy—especially beef and lamb—is an effective way for consumers to reduce their carbon footprint.
But there are also opportunities to reduce emissions by optimizing for more carbon-efficient practices and locations to produce foods. For some foods—in particular, beef, lamb, and dairy—there are large differences in emissions depending on how and where they’re produced. This is shown in the chart.
Producing 100 grams of protein from beef emits 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalents (CO2eq), on average. However, this ranges from 9 kilograms to 105 kilograms of CO2eq—a ten-fold difference.
Optimizing production in places where these foods are produced with a smaller footprint could be another effective way of reducing global emissions.
Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint
