Linking national food production to global supply chain impacts for the energy-climate challenge: the cases of the EU-27 and Turkey

Abstract

Although the food industry has a significant impact on the European economy and society, its contribution to energy consumption and global climate challenge is also considerably high compared to other manufacturing industries. However, the global energy and carbon impacts of European food production are not addressed sufficiently. With this motivation, this research aims to advance the body of knowledge on carbon and energy footprint analysis of food industries in the 27 member states of the European Union and Turkey. We employed a time series multi-region input–output analysis to analyze the carbon and energy footprints of food manufacturing industries. As a global multi-region input–output database, this research used the World Input–Output Database, which provides a time-series of world input–output tables for 40 countries worldwide covering 1440 economic sectors. The results from this study indicate that Germany, France and Spain have the largest food production-related energy footprint. All European countries have upstream suppliers as the dominant contributors of their total energy consumption, except for Romania, for which onsite impacts are dominant. Furthermore, the largest share of carbon emissions related to Turkish food manufacturing is found in Turkey's geographical boundary, whereas more than 50% of the total energy footprint of Turkey's food manufacturing industry is located in various regions outside of Turkey, including the rest of the world and particularly United States and the European Union. The findings show that upstream supply chains are responsible for over 90% of carbon emissions, while direct emissions and those from the first three-layers of food manufacturing supply chains are found to be responsible for approximately 80% of total carbon emissions.