Carbon Footprint of Greenhouse Production in EU—How Close Are We to Green Deal Goals?

Abstract

Sustainable greenhouse production has been brought to the forefront as one of the pillars in achieving the objectives set by the Green Deal strategy in 2020, for drastically decreasing net emissions from agriculture. The scope of this review was to capture the current situation regarding the sustainability of greenhouse production in the European Union and to present ways to decrease the carbon footprint. For this reason, a systematic search of studies was conducted, focusing on the investigation of the environmental assessment of conventional greenhouses in EU along with a bibliometric analysis to identify the relationships between the studies. In total, 52 papers were selected for an in-depth analysis that led to addressing the posed research questions. The study reveals that Spain and Italy were the most active countries in the literature for the calculation of the carbon footprint in greenhouses, the value of which showed a large variation per crop and per country and was significantly affected by the use of non-renewable energy sources. It was observed that practical solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of greenhouses have already been implemented and proposed, which indicates a positive inclination towards achieving the Green Deal objectives.