Consistent, inclusive emissions accounting identifies agriculture as the leading cause of climate change

Datasets of emissions from 1750-2020 and spreadsheet of calculations supporting the manuscript: Wedderburn-Bisshop, G. 2024 Consistent, inclusive emissions accounting identifies agriculture as the leading cause of climate change Abstract Recent advances in emissions accounting enable an improved assessment of sector responsibility for present day climate change. We apply these advances, namely: consistent gross accounting of CO2 sources; linking land use emissions with sectors; using Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) rather than Global Warming Potentials (GWPs) to compare emissions; and inclusive accounting of heating and cooling emissions. This assessment finds agriculture, the most extensive land user, to be the leading emissions sector and to have caused 60% (44%-86%) of global surface air temperature (GSAT) change from 1750 to 2020, due in large part to past and present deforestation, with 87% of this (52% of total warming) attributable to animal agriculture. We also find that fossil fuels have been responsible for 23% of warming, a reduced contribution due to the masking impact of cooling co-emissions. We test the validity of this accounting and find it useful for determining sector responsibility for present-day warming and for framing policy response, while recognising the dangers of assigning value to cooling emissions, due to health impacts and future warming.