Paper short abstract:

This paper examines current commensuration practices for agri-food system emissions in national long-term climate plans based on UNFCCC inventory rules. It argues that these practices hinder mitigation accountability, with strong implications for global climate justice.

Paper long abstract:

This paper delves into the concept of residual emissions (RE) within sectoral carbon accounting, focusing on the agri-food sector. Residual emissions, commonly regarded as hard-to-abate and necessitating compensation through carbon sinks, lack a consistent definition in long term climate strategies (LT-LEDs) and beyond (Buck et al. 2023). Despite this, many countries quantify sectoral residual emissions using UNFCCC inventory rules, which, for agriculture, creates a separation between agricultural emissions and those from directly related categories such as energy and land use.

We examine current commensuration practices in LT-LEDs to shed light on their implications for mitigation accountability and global climate justice. Three main implications are discussed. First, accounting for carbon emissions from a national production perspective overlooks consumption politics, creating risks of emissions leakage from high-consuming countries compensating national decarbonization with high-emissions imports. Second, separating agriculture from related accounting categories obscures emissions embedded in inputs for industrial farming (such as fertilizers, pesticides, and imported animal feed), undervaluing mitigation options whose indirect emissions reductions would count elsewhere. Third, treating biotic agricultural carbon sinks as permanent and fungible with other forms of carbon removal poses significant risks to the long-term credibility of mitigation efforts and claims.

The paper argues that current accounting practices co-produce fragmented national policy approaches to governing agri-food systems, hindering mitigation accountability and the adoption of system-based perspectives and alternative methodologies. It concludes by discussing alternative foresight exercises and commensuration practices to enable the development of national mitigation pledges in line with climate justice principles.