It’s widely cited that our global agriculture and food systems account for about one-third of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Zooming in on the European Union (EU), the region’s climate advisers estimate that the GHG emissions from the EU’s agriculture and food system represent a similar share — about a third of the EU’s total net GHG emissions.
When assessing the GHG emissions connected to the EU’s agrifood system, two categories need to be taken into account: those resulting from practices within in the EU, and those connected to agricultural products that the EU imports.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries are responsible for the GHGs emitted within their own territories, not those connected to products they import from elsewhere. These “domestic” GHG emissions are presented in the countries’ national GHG inventories, or systems that account for a country’s national GHG emissions.
Agricultural production is the main source of the EU’s domestic GHG emissions
The EU climate adviser’s estimate focuses on the EU agrifood system’s domestic GHG emissions. Those estimates are dominated by GHG emissions from producing agricultural outputs in the first place, while smaller shares of GHG emissions result from other steps in the supply chain.
These smaller (but still significant) shares include GHG emissions from manufacturing agricultural inputs, such as synthetic fertilizer or pesticides. The supply chain that gets the product from the farm to the consumer results in GHG emissions from processing, packaging, transporting, and selling the products. At the end of the chain, GHGs are emitted where energy is needed to consume the food and to deal with any waste.
More than half of the EU’s domestic agrifood GHG emissions are estimated to come from what is happening on the EU’s farms. These GHG emissions are linked to:
- Farmed animals
- Fertilizer use
- Other agricultural practices, such as burning crop residues
- Energy use, for example in machinery, heating, or irrigation
- The way agricultural land, namely cropland and grassland, is being used
GHG emissions from agricultural productions are spread across categories
Mapping the agrifood system’s GHG emissions becomes trickier when trying to locate them in the EU’s and EU countries’ national GHG inventories. This is because GHG emissions related to the EU’s agrifood system are spread across different categories in the inventories that the countries report to the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the Paris Agreement.
In EU climate policy, agricultural GHG emissions are most commonly understood as those from three of the categories described by the EU’s climate advisors: farmed animals, fertilizer use, and other agricultural practices (reported as category 3 to the UNFCCC). They represent the largest share of domestic GHG emissions from agricultural production in most EU countries.
However, in some EU countries, GHG emissions from agricultural land use can rival them. These are reported together with the net GHG emissions from other kinds of land use (such as forests) as the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry category (LULUCF). Agricultural land — grasslands and croplands (reported as category 4.B and 4.C to the UNFCCC) — can be a source or a sink of GHG emissions, meaning it either emits more than it sequesters, or the reverse. This depends on the type of land used for agricultural purposes and the way it is managed. Countries with very high GHG emissions due to agricultural land use, such as Germany or Finland, often farm large areas of drained peatlands. Drained peatlands cause about 5% of the EU’s total GHG emissions.
Lastly, GHG emissions from on-farm energy use are reported in the energy category — usually as an aggregated figure together with energy used in fishery and forestry (category 1.A.4.c).
Understanding that GHG emissions from agricultural production are spread across different reporting categories is important because separate countries may interpret the scope of agricultural GHG emissions differently, including for the targets they set, including or excluding certain categories as they deem appropriate.
Feeding EU agriculture’s climate footprint
The EU’s emissions accounting only registers the emissions occurring within its borders, not counting any emissions tied to imported goods. Yet, the EU’s agriculture and food system heavily relies on imports from elsewhere. The EU’s top imports are fruits, nuts and spices, oilcakes (for feed), coffee and tea, palm oil, and soybeans (for feed and bioenergy).
This means that the EU’s accounting has large blind spots, such as the GHG emissions caused by growing the massive amount of feed that the EU imports to sustain its meat and dairy industry. Overall, the destruction of forests to produce agricultural commodities for the EU market between 2005 and 2017 was estimated to have caused the equivalent of 40% of the EU’s annual emissions. More data can be explored on the Traded Emissions Tracker.
Replacing those imports is unrealistic. In the case of animal feed, replacing imports with EU-grown soy would require swapping more than 13 million hectares of other crops, equivalent to a little less than 15% of the EU’s entire cropland, with only three EU countries — France, Italy, and Croatia — estimated to provide high yields.
To learn more about the EU’s GHG emissions trends and projections to 2030 and 2040, explore our EU Emissions Dashboard. This is a developing project with new EU-wide data and data from EU Member States.
Figure 1: GHG emissions connected to the EU agriculture and food system. Own illustration based on 2023 data from European Scientific Advisory Body on Climate Change (2026) Climate adaptation and mitigation in the agri-food system – Recommendations for coherent EU policies, and information from WWF (2022) Europe eats the world.
