Alongside agriculture’s growing productivity worldwide, planet-scale farmland emissions have come down. In fact, increasing the yields on farms may be crucial to avoiding emissions.
This seeming contradiction is the core finding from an ambitious study that set out to understand global patterns of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture over the past 60 years. Driving the work was the researchers’ desire to get to the bottom of this puzzling question: how has global food production—which is famously emissions-intensive—managed to increase by an astronomical 270% since 1961, far outpacing greenhouse gas emissions which have risen by a comparatively smaller 45%?
To find out, the researchers pooled an enormous dataset, looking at farmland emission inputs, outputs, and yields from every country in the world between 1961 and 2021. All this data was then plugged into a mathematical equation that helped them detect the drivers behind farmland emissions.
They found that the amount of food we produce has soared, and with it, farm emissions have undoubtedly risen over time. However, that increase has slowly declined, year-on-year, from about 1.6% per year in the 1960s, to 0.28% in the 2010s.
What explains this change, they discovered, was the increasing efficiency of food production. Farmers overall have been producing much more ‘output’ per ‘input’ decade by decade—meaning more calories using less land, fertilizers, and labor. From 60 years of data, this trend is global, and it is clear. For example, regions like the European Union and China have been producing significantly more food over the past 60 years, yet emissions have either been stabilizing or declining. The main driver of that decline in both places? Increasingly efficient food production, the researchers found.
This broad trend did obscure some differences at the regional and national levels. For instance, many low-income countries including in Africa have experienced the slowest productivity growth in the world. In fact in many low-income nations, the main factor lowering emissions hasn’t been the increasing efficiency of production, but rather the reducing emissions intensity of farming.
There was even further nuance to this picture. The study revealed that rising efficiency across the board in farming doesn’t always bring positive effects. The authors showed that where land-saving efficiencies dominate—factors such as fertilizer-use, more productive seed varieties, and improved irrigation that increase yields per hectare—emissions intensity tends to decrease. But labour-saving efficiencies like mechanization have the opposite effect, raising energy use, and emissions with it.
In fact, this discovery highlighted an opportunity: by sharing land-saving approaches like better seeds, improved fertilizers, and other scientific and technological advancements more widely, we might also be able to help close the deep productivity gap that exists between high- and low-income nations.
What’s needed now is more granular research to reveal the trade-offs of taking specific actions in particular contexts, the researchers say. But at any rate, their key takeaway is a solid starting point: higher yields and lower emissions really can go hand-in-hand.
Ortiz-Bobea and Pieralli. “Unpacking the growth of global agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.” Science Advances. 2026.
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