Joseph Poore (University of Oxford) and Thomas Nemecek (Agroscope); published in Science; series processed by Our World in Data
Environmental footprints of food products (Poore & Nemecek 2018)
Global mean greenhouse gas emissions (kg CO2-equivalent, GWP100) per kilogram, per 100 g of protein and per 1,000 kcal, land use (m2 per kilogram) and the split of emissions across supply-chain stages (land-use change, farm, animal feed, processing, transport, retail, packaging, losses) for about 40 food products. A meta-analysis of about 570 life-cycle studies covering about 38,700 farms in 119 countries, reference year about 2010; not a time series. Global means hide wide producer variation, and beef from beef herds and from dairy herds are separate products.
Numbers published from it
Licence and credit
- Licence
- All rights reserved (Science, exclusive licensee AAAS); no data licence
- What the terms say
“Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science.”
From the producer's terms, checked 2026-10-04; re-checked automatically every week.
- Credit we give
- Poore, J. & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science 360(6392), 987–992, doi:10.1126/science.aaq0216 (erratum doi:10.1126/science.aaw9908). Values as processed by Our World in Data.
- Copy of the raw file
- Not allowed: we keep a private copy for our own checks and publish its fingerprint.
- Cite as
- Poore, J., & Nemecek, T. (2018). Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, 360(6392), 987–992. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216 (erratum: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw9908). Poore and Nemecek (2018) – processed by Our World in Data.
Files
Greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram of food product (kg CO2e per kg), reference year 2010.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-kg-poore.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=trueGreenhouse gas emissions per 100 grams of protein (kg CO2e per 100 g protein), reference year 2010.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-per-protein-poore.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=trueGreenhouse gas emissions per 1,000 kilocalories (kg CO2e per 1000 kcal), reference year 2010.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=trueLand use per kilogram of food product (m2 per kg), reference year 2010.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=trueGreenhouse gas emissions per kilogram split by supply-chain stage (land-use change, farm, animal feed, processing, transport, retail, packaging, losses), kg CO2e per kg; OWID labels the year 2018.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-emissions-supply-chain.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=true
Status
- Programme
- Published paper (June 2018) with an erratum (Science 363, 22 February 2019); no newer edition. OWID's series were last updated in 2019 and are maintained as published.
- Updates
- One-off (published 2018)
- Last check
- Unchanged since the last fetch (2026-10-05T11:04:34Z)