A global life-cycle inventory database of deforestation area and emissions for agricultural products

U. Martin Persson , Chandrakant Singh , Thomas Kastner, Michael Lathuillière, Carina Mueller, Christopher West

Food-system actors are increasingly required to quantify and report the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture-driven deforestation in their supply chains, yet comprehensive, up-to-date and openly accessible data to support such Scope 3 reporting remain scarce. Here we present a harmonized life-cycle inventory (LCI) database of deforestation area and carbon footprints covering 183 agricultural commodities across 179 countries for 2005–2024, conforming to the newly adopted GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard (LSRS). Combining spatially explicit deforestation and carbon-emission estimates from the Deforestation Driver and Carbon Emissions (DeDuCE) model with agricultural production and bilateral trade data, we calculate footprints under three emission-allocation methods and complement them with supply-mix-weighted footprints for consuming countries. Footprints vary by orders of magnitude across commodities and countries, driven primarily by the share of production on recently deforested land and, secondarily, by forest carbon stocks and crop yields. We further show that the combination of a long (20 year) amortization period and allocating emissions over time—as the LSRS mandates—implies that changes in footprints track changes in production, rather than deforestation, undermining the value of footprints calculated this for decision support. Allocating emissions equally over production avoids this problem, even for long amortization periods. We also find that global average emission factors misrepresent country-level consumption by two to three orders of magnitude. We argue that production-based allocation should be permitted alongside the mandated metric, and that readily computed supply-mix footprints should replace global averages—providing more accurate and decision-relevant support for efforts to reduce deforestation.