Food waste, put in context
Hannah Ritchie · 2020
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Ritchie gives food its share of emissions, separates out the part that is grown and never eaten, and then measures that share against aviation and against whole countries. The excerpt skips the citation and chart paragraphs that sit between.
What you will practice
- 01Give the whole share, then the part of it that is waste
- 02Say honestly which way your figure could be wrong
- 03Convert a percentage into something already familiar
Prepared source text
194 words · 11 sentencesFood production accounts for around one-quarter – 26% – of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is a lot, but it’s slightly easier to digest when we remind ourselves that food is a basic human need.
What’s harder to make sense of is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions which are caused in the production of food that is never eaten.
Around one-quarter of the calories the world produces are thrown away; they’re spoiled or spilled in supply chains; or are wasted by retailers, restaurants and consumers. To produce this food we need land, water, energy, and fertilizer inputs. It all comes at an environmental cost.
This means that food wastage is responsible for around 6% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, it’s likely to be slightly higher since the analysis from Poore and Nemecek (2018) does not include food losses on the farm during production and harvesting.
To put this in context: it’s around three times the global emissions from aviation. Or, if we were to put it in the context of national emissions, it would be the world’s third largest emitter. Only China (21%) and the United States (13%) emitted more.
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Required credit
Hannah Ritchie (2020), “Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions”, published online at OurWorldInData.org, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Reproduced here as an excerpt, unchanged apart from removing footnote markers.