Greenhouse gas emissions in the Norwegian Food Sector using different approaches

According to the Farm to Fork strategy from the European Commission, food systems cannot be resilient if they are not sustainable. Currently, sustainability of the food system is a key challenge, as the food sector contributes to 26% of the global greenhouse emissions, while agriculture uses 50% of global habitable land in addition to being responsible for 78% of ocean and freshwater pollution (1). One aim of the Farm to Fork strategy is thus to accelerate the transition towards a food system with a neutral environmental impact. The national strategy “Food Nation Norway” is proposed as an action plan towards 2030 where multiple aspects such as innovation, economic growth, and public health in addition to sustainability are considered and combined with focus on the sustainable development goals from United Nations (2). In addition, a voluntary agriculture and food sector agreement was adopted to reduce emissions by 5-million-ton CO₂-equivalents in the period 2021 – 2030 (3) Nevertheless, there are no robust data available to quantify where along the food value chain the emissions occur. Here, we aim to quantify emissions from Norwegian food chain and its supply chain stages from farm to fork. We quantify the emissions from the Norwegian food chain with three different approaches: top-down, bottom-up and hybrid. The top-down model uses data from the governmental statistics to calculate emissions while the bottom-up model is production based and considers the mass of food through the food chain. The hybrid model is a combination of government statistics, stock data, physical heat transfer models and other published information. The baseline emissions will be calculated for 2019 using all approaches 1990 baseline will be calculated using only the top-down approach. The system boundaries for the assessment include food production, processing and packaging, transportation, storage, retail, domestic consumption, and waste treatment. The aim is to compare the results obtained with the three different approaches and in addition based on these insights to provide best estimates for emissions from sectors and food types in the food chain. This assessment will help to identify where the greatest potential for emissions reduction and mitigation action can be applied. We can thus first identify the Norwegian food sector baseline (1990) and current (2019) carbon emissions which can be afterwards used to assess the potential for mitigation in relation to the planned national strategies.