Agricultural Emissions 2021

Report year 2021·Data year 2021

Farm-gate emissions (kt CO₂eq)·Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a score·Published by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

34 reference years (1990–2023), covering 166 to 198 countries, from FAOSTAT's Emissions Totals domain, read from the FAO's own bulk download. Greenhouse gases emitted at the FARM GATE — the emissions of agricultural production itself, before processing, transport or retail — as carbon-dioxide equivalent on the IPCC AR5 basis, with methane and nitrous oxide stored beside the headline. Between them those two are most of it: farming is the world's largest source of both. ⚠ IT IS A NATIONAL TOTAL, so the order is a SIZE ORDER. India leads because it has the world's largest livestock herd and 1.4 billion people to feed, not because it farms worst. More agricultural emissions genuinely is worse for the climate — but ranking countries on the total would colour the big food producers red for producing food, which is why this is marked as having no better end and is kept out of its topic's ranking. ⚠ FAO publishes no per-capita or per-output variant in this domain; its Emissions Intensities domain is what would compare farming systems properly, and it is per commodity rather than national. ⚠ It fills a real gap: EDGAR's CO₂ series is CC BY-NC-ND and unusable here, and the Global Carbon Budget covers carbon dioxide only, so nothing on the site measured farm methane or nitrous oxide before. The FAO ranks nobody, so no rank is stored; the POSITION is derived here and labelled as ours.

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