Beyond the Silos: The essential shift to holistic climate accounting

Picture any fresh item in the supermarket, a head of lettuce or a bunch of grapes, sitting on a supermarket shelf. Before arriving there, they traveled through a web of processes: cooled in storage rooms, transported across long distances in fuel-powered trucks and wrapped in packaging designed to make them last longer and look attractive to buyers. Yet when we measure its impact, official reports usually spotlight one piece of the puzzle, say farming or transport, and present it as the whole story. This narrow lens hides the complexity of the system and misrepresents the true environmental cost.

It is a well-stablished fact that the global food system is responsible for roughly one-third of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, most reporting frameworks treat each stage of the system separately. This fragmented accounting obscures the true magnitude of emissions and hides the most effective opportunities for reduction, making the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target far more difficult to reach.