A bottom-up approach to estimating emissions from food systems: Using Biennial Transparency Reports for fine- grained, country-level estimations

Estimating greenhouse gas emissions from food systems remains a major challenge due to the lack of harmonized, sector-specific data that capture their cross-cutting nature. Food systems span all economic sectors along which national GHG inventories are usually structured: energy, industry, agriculture, land use and waste. However, national inventories are not fine-grained enough to disaggregate the share of food in those emissions, obscuring their full contribution and hindering integrated mitigation planning. Reliable, up-to-date country-level data are scarce, and global databases rely heavily on top-down estimates and outdated assumptions.

To address this gap, we introduce a model estimating food system emissions (FSE) in Common Reporting Tables (CRT). The FSE-CRT model is a straightforward, transparent and bottom-up approach that draws exclusively on official national data, as reported by countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through their Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) and CRTs. It offers a credible alternative to global datasets that is grounded in nationally generated data that countries can control and validate (data sovereignty), and aligned with their priorities for food security and self-determined reporting.

Based on the first 83 CRTs available as of mid-2025, the FSE-CRT model estimates FSE at 10.6 GtCO₂eq, matching the FAOSTAT estimate of 10.3 GtCO₂eq for the same 83 countries. When extrapolated to all countries, this corresponds to 16.8 GtCO₂eq, very close to the global estimate of 17 GtCO₂eq reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: Babiker et al. 2022). The FSE-CRT model thus provides a realistic and replicable framework to validate and refine global FSE estimates, while enabling consistent, country- driven assessments for policy and planning.

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