Mapping Greenhouse Gas emissions from the food supply chains in France

Agri-Food systems are responsible for 31% of the global emissions. Food systems generate mainly carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and F-gases. This study takes part of the European project Enough (no 101036588) that aims to provide tools and methods to contribute to the EU Farm to Fork strategy to achieve climate neutral food businesses by 2050. In the current paper, an evaluation of emissions for France from 1990 to 2019 was carried out in order to build a database and identify the highest emitting food chain sectors in the country. The considered sectors are those at post-farm gate including processing, packaging, transport, retail, and consumption. Data is available in different inventories, using different methodologies, making them difficult to compare. In this study, the French governmental statistics have been used and indicated that retail is the largest emitting sector due to refrigerant leakages (direct emissions). These data were found to be in good agreement with those provided by FAO emissions-database for France. In terms of indirect emissions (energy consumption), transport was found to be the largest emitting sector. In terms of commodities, the carbon footprint of meat was found to be around 38001 kilotons CO(2)eq. The established French database has been also compared to that of some selected European countries (Italy, Norway, United-Kingdom, and Germany). The findings indicated that Norway has the lowest emissions rate.