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The environmental footprint of global food production

Nature Sustainability volume 5, pages 1027–1039 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 25 September 2023

Abstract

Feeding humanity puts enormous environmental pressure on our planet. These pressures are unequally distributed, yet we have piecemeal knowledge of how they accumulate across marine, freshwater and terrestrial systems. Here we present global geospatial analyses detailing greenhouse gas emissions, freshwater use, habitat disturbance and nutrient pollution generated by 99% of total reported production of aquatic and terrestrial foods in 2017. We further rescale and combine these four pressures to map the estimated cumulative pressure, or ‘footprint’, of food production. On land, we find five countries contribute nearly half of food’s cumulative footprint. Aquatic systems produce only 1.1% of food but 9.9% of the global footprint. Which pressures drive these footprints vary substantially by food and country. Importantly, the cumulative pressure per unit of food production (efficiency) varies spatially for each food type such that rankings of foods by efficiency differ sharply among countries. These disparities provide the foundation for efforts to steer consumption towards lower-impact foods and ultimately the system-wide restructuring essential for sustainably feeding humanity.

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Fig. 1: Schematic view of methods used to assess and map cumulative pressures from food production.
Fig. 2: Global maps of food’s footprint.
Fig. 3: Spatial overlap of the top 1% greatest pressure values for each of the four dominant pressures from food production.
Fig. 4: Proportional contribution to the cumulative food footprint in the highest-ranking countries.
Fig. 5: Proportion of total global cumulative environmental pressure for each food type (bar length), broken down by classes of pressure (components of each bar).
Fig. 6: Environmental efficiency (cumulative environmental pressure per tonne of protein produced) for major food types.

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Data availability

The source data used for these analyses is provided in Supplementary Table 25. All data are available76.

Code availability

The code used for these analyses is available from GitHub76 (https://github.com/OHI-Science/global_food_pressures).

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Acknowledgements

This research was a collaborative endeavour conducted by the Global Food Systems Working Group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California Santa Barbara. The Global Food Systems Working Group was funded by the Zegar Family Foundation. The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara provided invaluable infrastructural support for this work. J.T. was additionally supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (funding code 031B0792A). K.L.N. was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE210100606).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern, Melanie Frazier, Juliette Verstaen, Paul-Eric Rayner, Gage Clawson, Richard S. Cottrell & Caitlin D. Kuempel

  2. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Benjamin S. Halpern

  3. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Julia L. Blanchard & Kirsty L. Nash

  4. Centre for Marine Socioecology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    Julia L. Blanchard & Kirsty L. Nash

  5. Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia

    Richard S. Cottrell

  6. Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Richard S. Cottrell

  7. Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Halley E. Froehlich

  8. Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Halley E. Froehlich

  9. Department of Environmental Science, American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Jessica A. Gephart

  10. Technical University of Denmark, National Institute of Aquatic Resources, Lyngby, Denmark

    Nis S. Jacobsen

  11. Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

    Caitlin D. Kuempel

  12. Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Peter B. McIntyre

  13. International Atomic Energy Agency–Marine Environment Laboratories (IAEA-MEL), Radioecology Laboratory, Principality of Monaco, Monaco

    Marc Metian

  14. Program for Industrial Ecology, Department of Energy and Process Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Daniel Moran

  15. Institute for Economic Structures Research (GWS), Osnabrück, Germany

    Johannes Többen

  16. Social Metabolism & Impacts, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Member of the Leibniz Association, Potsdam, Germany

    Johannes Többen

  17. Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    David R. Williams

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Contributions

All authors contributed to the conceptualization of the project. M.F., J.V., P.-E.R., G.C. and B.S.H. contributed to methodology. M.F., J.V., P.-E.R. and G.C. contributed to software, validation, formal analysis and data curation. B.S.H. wrote the original draft. All authors contributed to writing the final draft and editing. J.V., M.F. and B.S.H. contributed to visualization. B.S.H. supervised the research. M.F. and B.S.H. provided project administration. B.S.H. acquired funding.

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Correspondence to Benjamin S. Halpern.

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Nature Materials thanks Luc Doyen, Pablo Elverdin and Günther Fischer for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Proportional contribution of pressures within each country.

Proportional contribution of each pressure to the cumulative food footprint in each country, summed across all foods. These countries collectively account for about 30% of pressure from food production (top countries are presented in Fig. 4a in the text). Stacked bars show the proportional contribution of marine (lighter colours, calculated as the Exclusive Economic Zone) and terrestrial (darker colours) pressures from all foods combined, including the high seas.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Proportional contribution of food categories to pressures within each country.

Proportional contribution of each food group to the cumulative food footprint in each country. These countries collectively account for about 30% of pressure from food production (top countries are presented in Fig. 4b in the text). Stacked bars are the proportional contribution of each major food group, including feed for livestock and aquaculture, summed for all four pressures in each country and the high seas.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Proportion of total global cumulative pressure for crops, broken down by pressure (components of each bar).

Proportional amounts are the per-unit pressures times the total global production. This includes crops for consumed primarily by humans and animal feed.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Environmental Efficiency by kcal for Major Food Types.

Environmental efficiency (cumulative environmental pressure per million kcal produced) for major food types. Larger values represent less efficient foods. Each point is a country (jittered for visibility), with median and interquartile range indicated by the boxes. Plots to the right show extreme positive values and are on separate scales. Feed is not included in livestock primary and secondary products or mariculture.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Environmental Efficiency by Tonnes Production for Major Food Types.

Environmental efficiency (cumulative environmental pressure per tonne reported production) for major food types. Larger values represent less efficient foods. Each point is a country (jittered for visibility), with median and interquartile range indicated by the boxes. Plots to the right show extreme positive values and are on separate scales. Feed is not included in livestock primary and secondary products or mariculture.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Data quality assessment by food type.

Data quality assessment of each food system and pressure scored on a scale ranging from 1–5. Data quality was assessed using a bottom-up approach, where each data source was scored on spatial resolution, spatial extent, system specificity, and temporal accuracy.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Data quality assessment by food type and stressor.

Data quality assessment breakdown for each food system, pressure, and score scored on a scale from 1–5. Data quality was assessed using a bottom-up approach, where each data source was scored on spatial resolution, spatial extent, system specificity, and temporal accuracy.

Supplementary information

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Supplementary Data 1

Supplementary Data Tables 1–10.

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Halpern, B.S., Frazier, M., Verstaen, J. et al. The environmental footprint of global food production. Nat Sustain 5, 1027–1039 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00965-x

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