Food industry must move beyond carbon emissions reporting to unlock true value of decarbonisation

CHICHESTER, U.K. - Rezul -- Despite a decade of improved carbon reporting across the food industry, emissions are not falling fast enough. Food and agricultural supply chains account for around 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet improved disclosure has not translated into the operational change needed to drive meaningful reductions.

A report published today by sustainability consultancy Aethr Associates argues the reason is structural: carbon has become something businesses measure and disclose, but not something they systematically manage.

Aethr calls this the 'decarbonisation delivery gap': the disconnect between measuring emissions and systematically removing the inefficiencies that drive them. A core part of the problem is that traditional carbon metrics measure scale rather than efficiency; they tell an organisation how much carbon it produces, but not how well it is converting that carbon into economic value, or where to act. A growing business can appear to worsen even as it becomes more efficient, and vice versa. With regulatory scrutiny of carbon performance tightening, the pressure to close that gap is growing.

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To address this, the report introduces the Aethr Carbon Value Metric (ACVM), linking greenhouse gas emissions directly to Gross Value Added (GVA). By measuring carbon emissions against the economic value created, it compares which companies are generating more value for every tonne of carbon emitted.  When emissions fall and value creation rises, the ACVM improves, giving organisations a clear signal of real progress across sites, business units, and over time.

To illustrate the metric, Aethr applied the ACVM to publicly available data from nine UK food retailers: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, M&S, Aldi, the Co-op, John Lewis Partnership and Lidl, across 2022, 2023, and 2024. The year-on-year trends reveal variation that absolute reporting does not: most retailers show improvement, but the pace differs considerably, and some show stagnation in particular years. The analysis is not intended as a comparative ranking; structural differences between businesses affect results, and the metric is most meaningfully used to track each organisation's progress over time. Reporting boundaries also vary: M&S, for example, includes its own distribution fleet in its emissions figures, which is not the case for all retailers, while the John Lewis Partnership figures cover the whole business rather than Waitrose alone.

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Retail provides a useful illustration because it is one of the few parts of the food system with sufficiently consistent public data to apply the metric meaningfully, but Aethr is clear that the delivery gap is not a retail problem. It is a food sector problem.

Access the full story and report at https://www.aethr.co.uk/post/food-industry-must-move-beyond-carbon-emissions-reporting-to-unlock-true-value-of-decarbonisation-n