Spatial Differentiation of the Emissivity of Agriculture in Europe

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at determining the spatial variation in the carbon intensity of the agricultural sector in Europe. The analyses used the volume of greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector (in 2020), expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent, calculated according to the IPCC methodology for 31 European countries. To reduce variance and the impact of country size on emissions, three emissivity factors were calculated, depending on: agricultural area, value of goods produced by agriculture and population. To verify the relationship between emissivity and location, the Moran autocorrelation coefficient was used, calculated on a modified weighting matrix that, in addition to the criterion of a common border, takes into account the similarity of objects in terms of the values of diagnostic variables (similarity determined using cluster analysis) – in this case indicators describing the emissivity of the agricultural sector. The study showed that there was no reason to reject the hypothesis of a random distribution of objects in space with respect to the values of the indicators included in the study. It can therefore be concluded that there are some similarities in the emissivity from the different European economies, as evidenced by the cluster analysis results, while there is no spatial correlation.