Hannah Ritchie
speaker
25 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Hannah Ritchie’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So if you look at globally emissions from the food system, food miles or food transport only contributes around 5% to 6% globally.
So it's actually a much, much smaller fraction than I think many people would assume.
As a global average for apples, it's around 20%.
One of the reasons for that is that the emissions that are associated with land use and emissions on the farm for apples are actually very low compared to many other food choices.
So if you think about it, even if the amount of emissions associated with transporting a kilogram of beef and a kilogram of apples is the same, right?
Say we're shipping beef and apples all the way from New Zealand and the emissions associated that is the same.
you would expect that as a share of the total carbon footprint of a food, transport will be much lower for beef than it is for apples.
And that's because the total amount of emissions associated with the land use change and producing the food is much higher for beef than it is for apples.
So this 20% transport point for apples is actually just a very clear indication that the carbon footprint of apples, whether it's UK based, whether it's New Zealand based, it's actually very, very low, right?
Apples are a relatively low carbon food.
And there are maybe two main reasons in the study why you might assume producing apples in the UK emits more carbon than New Zealand.
And one of the factors is yield and productivity of farming.
So we know that apple yields in New Zealand are about 30% higher than they are in the UK.
I think when you're comparing yield, one is the total amount of produce that you can produce for a given unit of area of land.
I think what's also key for productivity is that if you have very, very productive plants, often you can get a larger number of apples for less inputs.
And in this case, less inputs might be fertilizer use, right?
So if you have a better climate,
if you maybe have better apple varieties that are more productive, you might need less of, say, fertilizer to produce a given amount of apples.
The UK has really cleaned up its electricity grid.
So emissions per unit of electricity in the UK have more than halved.
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