Data

Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems, world

Greenhouse gas emissions from the world's food and farming systems each year since 1990, in carbon dioxide equivalent: on farms, from clearing land for agriculture, and from making, moving, selling, cooking and throwing away food, as estimated by FAO.

Latest value

16.5Gt CO₂e

World, 2023. Version 2025-10-28.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems, world (billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent)

34 values from 1990 to 2023.

Show as a table

Greenhouse gas emissions from agrifood systems, world, every value
Period	Value (Gt CO₂e)	Status
1990	14.8	final
1991	14.9	final
1992	14.9	final
1993	14.9	final
1994	15.0	final
1995	15.2	final
1996	15.1	final
1997	16.1	final
1998	15.5	final
1999	15.4	final
2000	15.4	final
2001	13.6	final
2002	14.2	final
2003	14.0	final
2004	14.7	final
2005	14.5	final
2006	15.1	final
2007	14.8	final
2008	14.8	final
2009	15.2	final
2010	15.1	final
2011	15.3	final
2012	15.4	final
2013	15.5	final
2014	16.0	final
2015	16.0	final
2016	15.4	final
2017	15.5	final
2018	15.7	final
2019	16.0	final
2020	15.7	final
2021	16.1	final
2022	16.2	final
2023	16.5	final

Calculated by Environment Dashboard from FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT. Accessed on 5 October 2026. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data Licence: CC-BY-4.0. Changes: converted from kilotonnes to billion tonnes of CO₂-equivalent. CC BY 4.0 (FAO Statistical Database Terms of Use).

Where it comes from

Producer: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Statistics Division · FAOSTAT agrifood emissions, livestock emissions, emissions intensities, land use and food loss
Version: 2025-10-28
File: https://bulks-faostat.fao.org/production/Emissions_Totals_E_All_Data_(Normalized).zip
Fetched: 2026-10-04 (automatically), 20,501,708 bytes
Fingerprint: sha256 d2c47e116553711f7c2fd6b62437db511038fd9bd9ec77815fa69ff7a18a89a9ETag "99a1f7889c9873df9bdb619a99572a1f-3" · Last-Modified Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:13:44 GMT
Copies: No Wayback copy recorded yet.Our copy of the exact file
Cite the producer: FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT. Accessed on 5 October 2026. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

Producer: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Statistics Division · FAOSTAT agrifood emissions, livestock emissions, emissions intensities, land use and food loss
Version: 2025-10-28
File: https://bulks-faostat.fao.org/production/datasets_E.json
Fetched: 2026-10-05 (automatically), 109,120 bytes
Fingerprint: sha256 008f475c971a7770c69b1bc48f1c3a5fa8bf3873e762d6e1e9516bb0a700ebdaETag W/"157c9ec8e5eea09a02497cc10f67bcdb" · Last-Modified Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:49:35 GMT
Copies: No Wayback copy recorded yet.Our copy of the exact file
Cite the producer: FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT. Accessed on 5 October 2026. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data Licence: CC-BY-4.0.

What was done to it

Read Emissions_Totals_E_All_Data_(Normalized).csv from FAOSTAT's Emissions totals (GT) bulk zip. The vintage is the domain's DateUpdate, 28 October 2025, from FAOSTAT's bulk-download catalogue (datasets_E.json), whose entry names this zip and gives FileRows 2,500,090, the number of data rows in this file. The zip was last modified on the server on Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:13:44 GMT.
Code: pipeline/src/envdash/transforms/food/faostat_emissions.py · code sha256 ba01ed68c7b4c466… · inputs d2c47e116553… 008f475c971a…
Kept the World (area code 5000), "FAO TIER 1" rows of item "Agrifood systems" (code 6518), element "Emissions (CO2eq) (AR5)" (code 723113): one value per year, 1990–2023, in kilotonnes of CO₂-equivalent (IPCC AR5 100-year global warming potentials). Rows from FAO's "UNFCCC" source are not used.
Code: pipeline/src/envdash/transforms/food/faostat_emissions.py · code sha256 ba01ed68c7b4c466… · inputs d2c47e116553… 008f475c971a…
Converted kilotonnes to billion tonnes by dividing by 1,000,000 (exact decimal arithmetic on the printed values).
Code: pipeline/src/envdash/transforms/food/faostat_emissions.py · code sha256 ba01ed68c7b4c466… · inputs d2c47e116553… 008f475c971a…
Every value used carries FAO's flag E, which the file's codebook defines as "Estimated value".
Code: pipeline/src/envdash/transforms/food/faostat_emissions.py · code sha256 ba01ed68c7b4c466… · inputs d2c47e116553… 008f475c971a…

What it covers

Geography: World
Gases combined with: AR5-GWP100
Land use, land-use change and forestry: included
Basis: FAOSTAT item "Agrifood systems": emissions within the farm gate (crops and livestock), from land-use change, and from pre- and post-production (fertilizer manufacturing, processing, packaging, transport, retail, household consumption and waste disposal). Land-use change counts only what FAO attributes to agriculture: its item "Land-use change" is net forest conversion (deforestation) plus fires in humid tropical forests and fires in organic soils (peat). The carbon taken up by forests (FAOSTAT item "Forestland", a net removal) is not subtracted. FAO Tier 1 estimates, not country inventory submissions.
Unit: billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO₂e)