What are the environmental impacts of food and agriculture?
Feeding the world whilst reducing food's impact on the environment is one of our greatest challenges in the coming decades. What are food's environmental impacts?
Food, energy and water: this is what the United Nations refers to as the ‘nexus’ of sustainable development. As the world’s population has expanded and gotten richer, the demand for all three has seen a rapid increase. Not only has demand for all three increased, but they are also strongly interlinked: food production requires water and energy; traditional energy production demands water resources; agriculture provides a potential energy source.
Our latest series on Our World in Data focuses on the environmental impacts of food. Ensuring everyone in the world has access to a nutritious diet in a sustainable way is one of the greatest challenges we face. We cover the human aspects of food and nutrition in various entries, including hunger and undernourishment, micronutrient deficiency, food per person, diet compositions and obesity. In this series we focus more on the environmental consequences.
What are the environmental impacts of food and agriculture?
The visualization here shows a summary of some of the main global impacts:
- Food accounts for over a quarter (26%) of global greenhouse gas emissions1;
- Half of the world’s habitable (ice- and desert-free) land is used for agriculture;
- 70% of global freshwater withdrawals are used for agriculture2;
- 78% of global ocean and freshwater eutrophication (the pollution of waterways with nutrient-rich pollutants) is caused by agriculture1;
- 94% of mammal biomass (excluding humans) is livestock. This means livestock outweigh wild mammals by a factor of 15-to-1.3
Food, therefore, lies at the heart of trying to tackle climate change, reducing water stress, pollution, restoring lands back to forests or grasslands, and protecting the world’s wildlife.
Endnotes
Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987-992.
FAO. (2011). The state of the world’s land and water resources for food and agriculture (SOLAW) – Managing systems at risk. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome and Earthscan, London.
Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., & Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(25), 6506-6511.
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Hannah Ritchie (2019) - “What are the environmental impacts of food and agriculture?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/env-impacts-of-food' [Online Resource]BibTeX citation
@article{owid-env-impacts-of-food,
author = {Hannah Ritchie},
title = {What are the environmental impacts of food and agriculture?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2019},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/env-impacts-of-food}
}
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