A Cross-Country study of CO₂e Emissions and Crop Production Over Three Decades

Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2.4: Sustainable Food Production and Resilient Agricultural Practices by 2030, involves the trade-off between increasing food production while protecting the environment. This project explores how agricultural practices impact the balance between crop production and CO2e cropland emissions across 174 countries from 1990-2022. It has three main goals: first, to cluster countries based on their production levels and CO2e emissions per hectare to identify diverse sustainability profiles; second, to analyze key factors, such as farming practices, environmental conditions, and governance, that explain why countries fall into different groups; third, to examine how these groups have evolved over time by selecting the top country in each cluster and continent, and to determine whether countries are progressing toward or diverging from sustainable farming. A rule-based clustering method revealed four groups: (A) Low Production–Low Emissions, (B) Low Production–High Emissions, (C) High Production–High Emissions, and (D) High Production–Low Emissions. A classification model XGBoost identified synthetic nitrogen fertilizers as the primary factor influencing production and emissions, followed by precipitation, temperature, electricity use, and pesticides. Countries in clusters B and C require urgent attention as they are the furthest from achieving SDG 2.4. Field research should be initiated by the local farmers of these countries, who should be supported by agribusinesses and policymakers with the necessary resources to make their agricultural practices both productive and sustainable by 2030.