Agro-food greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly driven by foreign demand

Abstract Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have risen sharply over the last few decades because of the globalization of economies and countries’ productive specialization. We have built a model able to trace all agro-food emissions along global value chains for 1986–2013. The results show that while the domestic fraction of food emissions has slightly decreased, the foreign fraction has grown by 75%, accounting for 24% of all agro-food emissions today. A few supply chains concentrate most of this increase, with consumption of animal products explaining 70% of all embodied emissions in trade. It was also found that higher incomes resulted in higher percentages of foreign agro-food emissions, and that increasing the proportion of imports in these footprints can be associated with lower per capita emissions. Because trade increasingly redistributes agro-food emissions around the world, national mitigation efforts should be complemented with strong international and coordinated cooperation actions.