Expenditure–Driven Patterns in India’s Dietary GHG Emissions

Dietary patterns in India are increasingly shifting toward higher consumption of animal-based foods, with implications for climate change. However, dietary choices in a country with widespread economic disparities are influenced by socioeconomic factors. While previous studies have examined the role of income (or expenditure) on food consumption, their contributions in driving dietary GHG are not well explored. Here, we link literature-derived GHG emission factors for food items with food consumption data obtained from three rounds of the Household Consumer Expenditure Survey (1999-00, 2011-12, 2022-23), further differentiated by deciles based on monthly per-capita expenditure.

The total dietary GHG emissions increased by 25% from 449 Mt CO₂eq in 1999-2000 to 601 Mt CO₂eq in 2022-2023 for India. Dietary GHG emissions are unevenly concentrated among deciles, with the top three expenditure deciles contributing comparably to emissions (30%; 2022) as the lower three deciles (29%; 2022), despite accounting a much smaller section of the population. A clear pattern emerges of higher deciles exhibiting a significantly greater share of animal food emissions. In 2022, animal food emissions accounted for 46% of total dietary emissions for the tenth decile compared to 37% in the lowest decile.

A similar influence of expenditure is also observed in dietary footprints. In 2022, the per-capita GHG emissions ranged from 0.9 to 1.9 kg CO₂eq/day across deciles. Dietary footprints shifted from whole grains (35% to 17%) toward animal-based foods (23% to 33%) from the lowest to highest deciles. Additionally, decile contributions differed spatially, with some states dominated by lower-decile emissions and others by upper-decile emissions. Overall, the dietary GHG intensity increases with rising per-capita expenditure, highlighting the need for climate and nutrition policies that explicitly account for socioeconomic heterogeneity.