The debate about the European Union’s 2040 climate target has raised many questions about what is necessary to achieve it. The European Commission’s own modelling shows that focusing on more sustainable food and farming systems can not only deliver a significant contribution to climate action and improve public health but also reduce the need for controversial carbon capture and removal technologies to achieve a net 90% emission reduction target.
The process to set the EU’s intermediate 2040 climate target on the path to climate neutrality has been characterized by repeated delays, leading the bloc to fail to submit its 2035 contribution to the Paris Agreement (so-called Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC) in time to the United Nations.
The target that EU institutions and Member States may agree on in the upcoming weeks is expected to be considerably weaker than the Commission’s original recommendation.
The initial ambition of net 90% domestic emission reductions compared to 1990 — a level located at the lower end of its Scientific Advisory Board recommendations — was undermined by potentially allowing international carbon offsets to count towards the region’s climate targets, and EU leaders have discussed additional conditions to agree on a final target.
The debate practically ignored a space that has so far underdelivered on climate, despite its considerable potential: the EU’s food and agriculture system.
Not only could a just transition towards healthier and more sustainable food system allow the EU to achieve its 2040 climate target without relying on the offset loophole but the Commission’s own modelling shows that it would also reduce the bloc’s reliance on risky technologies.
The climate potential of moving towards sustainable food systems
The modelling developed to assess options for the 2040 climate target shows that a holistic shift to more sustainable food systems can reduce the agriculture sector’s GHG emission by 46% below 2015 levels. A narrow focus on technological and efficiency measures would only achieve a 30% reduction.
The European Commission traditionally relies on economy-wide models to explore the potential effects of certain climate ambition levels, as well as levers to achieve the EU’s climate targets. As part of the impact assessment for the 2040 climate target, the Commission developed a range of different scenarios.
The main set of scenarios explores the potential measures on the production side — i.e., deployment of mitigation technologies. The most ambitious of these scenarios reflects the Commission’s original recommendation to set a net 90% emission reduction target.
To achieve this target, the scenario assumes that the agriculture sector makes full use of mitigation technologies and measures, such as selective livestock breeding, biogas production, additives in animal feed and technologies to improve fertilizer application, as well as rewetting peatlands.
While that scenario outlines that a cut of 30% of agriculture emissions may be possible, such technologies would likely require a certain level of intensification and consolidation on the farm level. Given the impacts of concentrated agriculture systems on other environmental aspects, as well as rural economies, some of the technologies — such as biogas — may be undesirable at scale.
Yet, the Commission also assessed an alternative pathway to achieve a net 90% emission reduction within the region, the so-called “LIFE” variant. This scenario adds climate ambition in the EU’s food and agriculture system by shifting to more sustainable lifestyles.
Adding more “LIFE” to the EU’s food systems
The “LIFE” scenario shows two additional areas of intervention can increase the extent of climate action in the sector: consumption and better environmental use of resources. Together, the interventions can result in a 16% emissions cut in the sector.
To achieve these cuts, the model assumes a modest gradual shift in diets, assuming that the dietary pattern of EU citizens moves towards the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet Commission by 25% in 2040 — a diet that increases the share of vegetables, fruits, and legumes in overall food consumption while reducing the share of animal products. The EAT-Lancet Commission’s recently updated its recommendations, however its core message of the health benefits and environmental necessity of shifting on average to a more plant-based diet remained unchanged.1
The second set of levers the LIFE scenario considers are to cut emissions is a combination of reducing food waste and the implementing the objectives from the Farm to Fork Strategy and the Biodiversity Strategy. These include goals such as a reduced use of mineral fertilizer and pesticides, better nutrient cycling, and increasing organic farming across the EU.
Overall, the “LIFE” scenario mainly achieves additional climate benefits by decreasing livestock rearing and meat and dairy production — while other scenarios assume production levels would remain stable despite carbon pricing. By 2040, beef production would decrease by 49%, dairy by 18%, and pig, poultry, and sheep collectively by 24%. In addition, livestock would be raised in a less concentrated manner, with the density of cattle activities decreasing by overall 29%, for other livestock by 26%.
Climate action in the food system brings benefits beyond climate
A shift to healthier and more sustainable diets would also bring additional environmental, health, and economic benefits.
For example, the scenario outlines how more carbon could be potentially stored in the EU’s land sink, given that reduced livestock and fodder production may make more land available for buffer stripes, hedges, and other landscape elements, as well as extensive grasslands, forests, and for peatland rewetting. In addition, biodiversity-friendly farming practices would represent up to 71% of farming at the EU level — 14% more than in other scenarios. Areas affected by severe pollution of water and soil from overapplication of synthetic fertilizer and manure decrease more than in other scenarios.
The shift would also bring health benefits for EU citizens, not only due to healthier diets but also because of a significant decrease in air pollutants such as ammonia, nitrogen oxides, or volatile organic compounds.
Reducing the demand for cereal animal feed overall also strengthens the strategic autonomy of the EU’s food system given the region’s high reliance on feed imports, and as such could enhance food security.
Reducing emissions avoids risky bets on unproven technology
Taking action in the food and farming sector also has other significant benefits for climate policy: less reliance on risky and expensive technology to clean up climate pollution.
A good rule of thumb in climate science — and what the models tell us — is that the deeper we cut emissions now and in the next decade, the less we’ll need to rely on measures to clean up those emissions from the atmosphere after the fact.
Since decarbonization and fossil fuel phase-out have been slow to gain footing in some sectors, technologies that are meant to capture carbon from energy or industrial plants (carbon capture and storage, or CCS) and to take carbon out of the atmosphere (technological carbon dioxide removals, or CDR) have gained more attention.
They have been criticized as a strategy of industrial polluters to avoid phasing out fossil fuels or the inefficient and polluting burning of biomass for energy, as well as for their overstated potential for safe and sustainable storage sites, their limited potential to actually make a dent in climate action, and their significant energy, water, and biomass demands. Such technologies have underdelivered for decades, casting doubt on the promises made by the technologies’ proponents.
The Commission’s own impact assessment modelling concludes that the shift towards more sustainable food systems – as part of an overall shift to more sustainable lifestyles – outlined in the “LIFE” scenario lowers the need for carbon capture and industrial carbon removals (p. 40). A look at the modelled numbers shows that the LIFE scenario would rely around 20% less on carbon capture and close to 65% less on industrial carbon removals to achieve the 2040 emission reduction target.2
More ambition is possible
The Commission’s scenarios only consider a few possible pathways. Other scenarios, such as the one drawn up by Agora Agriculture, the demand-focused scenario by the EU’s scientific advisory board or an agroecology-focused scenario show that a stronger focus on shifts in diets in combination with better farming practices can add ambition beyond the Commission’s main scenarios for 2040.
Yet, in striving for the highest possible ambition to protect our climate, how we achieve climate targets is just as important as the magnitude of the targets themselves.
Models can help us understand broadly what pathways could help us achieve multiple goals at the same time — but they come with many limitations and large-scale changes that need to be translated practically to the local level.
It remains unclear to what extent EU policymakers will weaken the ambition of the Commission’s original recommendation of net 90% emission reduction. Such changes may significantly impact what level of climate ambition policymakers foresee for in the agriculture sector.
What is clear, however, is that the earlier we start making changes in our food and agriculture systems that go beyond technological efficiency, the less we may have to rely on carbon capture technologies that currently show little evidence of being reliable and sustainable solutions. We should take that opportunity to start adapting to a new reality of our food system now, instead of banking on further delays.
Footnotes
- The Commission recognizes that such a shift is a question of changing structures, not simply individual choices. The environment in which people make choices about what to eat (i.e., public food services and retail) must be improved to make healthy and sustainable choices the easiest and most affordable ones.
- For more information about the assumptions underpinning in the modelling changes, see Table 9 and associated discussion on p. 39-40 in Part 1 of the Impact Assessment, as well as p. 7 in Part 3.
