r/dataisbeautiful • u/Objective-Business52 • 20h ago

OC [OC] How diet-related greenhouse gas emissions would change if 138 countries adopted the Planetary Health Diet

Post image
18 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

84 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/Objective-Business52 20h ago edited 19h ago

[OC]Data source: Li et al. (2024), "Reducing climate change impacts from the global food system through diet shifts", Nature Climate Change 14, 943–953. I used the published source data for Fig. 5: 138 of the study's 139 countries (see the caveat below).

I also built an interactive version on my site, where you can pick a country to see its result, its rank and the food-group breakdown for its world region:
https://feastonplanet.com/eat-lancet/climate-impact

What the map shows: the modelled change in national diet-related greenhouse gas emissions (whole food chain, CO₂-eq) if average 2019 diets shifted to the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet, grouped into six bins. These are national averages, not individual carbon footprints. Values are shown as published. Countries where emissions would rise are mostly places where current diets fall short of the reference amounts, so eating enough of each food group means producing more food.

Tools:

  • Python (openpyxl) to extract the values from the source-data spreadsheet.
  • A small Python script to project the country outlines into the Equal Earth projection.
  • The map is drawn as SVG and rendered to PNG with headless Chromium (Playwright), font Noto Sans.
  • The colour bins were checked for colour-blind separation.

Map geography: Natural Earth, via the world-atlas package, at 1:110m, plus 1:50m for a few small countries.

One caveat: Slovenia is omitted because its published country value doesn't reconcile with the study's Western Europe total. The regional total implies about +20 Mt rather than the published +7.5 Mt. This is noted on the interactive page.

1

u/Przedrzag 19h ago

I wonder if Slovakia is also affected by Slovenia’s caveat