Apples to kangaroos: A framework for developing internationally comparable carbon emission factors for crop and livestock products

This study proposes a method to combine the Food and Agriculture Organization's available greenhouse gas data, production data, and agricultural yields and scaling it against benchmarks in the literature to estimate a time-series of crop and livestock carbon emission factors that are internally consistent within the Food and Agriculture Organization's data set and comparable from nation to nation. The framework provided is then used to produce a sample set of carbon emission factors for Chinese agricultural import suppliers to determine the embodied greenhouse gases in China's food imports.