Making Globalisation and Trade Work for People and Planet: International Spillovers Embodied in the European Union’s (EU’s) Food Supply Chains
Human demand for agri-food products contributes to environmental degradation in the form of land-use impacts and emissions into the atmosphere. Development and implementation of suitable policy instruments to mitigate these impacts requires robust and timely statistics at sectoral, regional, and global levels. In this study, we quantify emissions (carbon dioxide, particulate matter, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide), land use, employment, and income-related impacts embodied in European Union’s (EU’s) demand for agri-food products. We trace these environmental and social impacts across EU’s trading partners to identify specific sectors and regions as hotspots of international spillovers embodied in EU’s food supply chains and find that these hotspots are wide-ranging in all continents. EU’s food demand is responsible for 5% of the EU’s total CO2 consumption-based footprint, 9% of the total NOX footprint, 16% of the total PM footprint, 6% of the total SO2 footprint, 46% of the total land-use footprint, 13% of the total employment footprint, and 5% of the total income footprint. Our results serve to inform future reforms in the EU for aligning policies and strategies with the SDGs and the objectives of the Paris Climate Agreement.
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