Overview

If you thought emissions from man-made machines were the single biggest contributor to the climate crisis, think again. A new study has mapped the environmental impact of global food production, reporting that food production and related activities are one of the biggest threats to biological diversity and one of the worst drivers of the climate crisis.

The science and other stuff to know

The extensive study, The environmental footprint of global food production, was published in Nature Sustainability and had contributions from 16 researchers, including those from the University of Leeds and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“No one has done this before, and the mapping has been a gigantic task,” said Daniel Moran, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

Their study produced digital maps of food production across the world and helped the researchers predict the pressure that the global food system exerted on the environment and climate.

The finding showed that the five worst offenders were China, India, the U.S., Brazil, and Pakistan when it came to measuring the environmental impact of food production.

The impact on the environment that the researchers gauged through their study were CO2 emissions, water consumption, destruction of habitats, and pollution. They worked with data on 99 percent of all food production in water and on land from the year 2017.

Moran and his team also mapped the entire life cycle of the food, meaning the impact right from the time the grain was sown up until the time it turned into bread and reached the table for consumption. They took into account factors such as “soil depletion, pesticides, toxin runoff, animal feed, irrigation, diesel for transport and emissions from fertilizer production”, Phys.org reported.

The findings revealed that 90 percent of all food production took place on 10 percent of the world’s land area. Moreover, it was discovered that dairy, which is thought to have a mega environmental impact, was far more efficient than pig farming.

So what?

A rising global population is driving the demand for not just luxury foods like coffee and exotic fruits, but even for staples such as wheat and rice, to unprecedented levels. This rising demand and the quest for greater profits are not only affecting soil health but are also contributing to expedited and excessive wastage of groundwater, uncontrolled usage of fertilizers and pesticides, and illegal clearing of forestland.

Food, both raw and processed, is one of the highest-traded commodities across the world and one that contributes significantly to global freight and cargo operations. Mapping the cost of taking a pound of soybeans produced in the U.S. all the way to the Southeast Asia, or a pound of coffee produced in Brazil to China incurs a physical, monetary and environmental cost that often gets ignored.

The research, therefore, has come just at the right time for the world to consider its demand patterns and rely on food that is locally produced and environmentally sustainable. Researchers hope that the findings could help food production become much more sustainable and less hazardous to the environment.

What’s next?

Moran and his team of researchers have not identified any food as bad or better. He maintained that “although local food is often sustainable, people may want to find a balance between their desire to be self-sufficient with all types of food and the most environmentally efficient production possible”.

Moving forward, the Nature Conservancy would be using the study to advise “global food giants on how to find the most environmentally efficient solutions”, Phys.org added.