Chile's Push to Fix Its Agricultural Emissions Inventory

Chile's Ley Marco de Cambio Climático has been in force since 2022, committing the country to a transition toward carbon neutrality by 2050. Turning that legal commitment into actual emissions reductions in agriculture depends on something far less visible than a target date: whether the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (INGEI) for the agriculture sector actually reflects what is happening on Chilean farms.

A report from ODEPA (Chile) Papas y Tuberculos lays out an action plan for improving that inventory and for building a companion tool to evaluate mitigation scenarios for the sector. The framing is blunt about the stakes: without a more accurate INGEI, decisions about where to direct logistical and economic effort risk missing the areas that actually generate the most emissions.

The first priority identified is reinforcing the databases the INGEI relies on. That means improving both activity data and parametric data — the raw inputs that determine how accurately the inventory represents national agriculture. The plan calls for joint work between the private and public sectors so that information flows more easily between the different entities that make up Chile's agriculture sector.

Where data simply doesn't exist yet, the plan calls for dedicated research projects to fill the gaps. A related priority is developing country-specific emission factors, generated through research rather than borrowed from international defaults, which the report argues increases the accuracy and reliability of emissions data across the different sub-sectors that make up agriculture — including crop production, livestock, and other categories the inventory covers.

An inventory that only counts emissions after the fact has limited value for policy. The report frames the INGEI's real purpose as also identifying which areas or activities generate the greatest emissions, so mitigation measures can be targeted rather than applied broadly. That requires modeling tools capable of estimating the impact of specific mitigation measures before they're implemented, and confirming afterward that any changes actually show up in the inventory itself.

The plan specifically calls for updating the calculation equations underlying the inventory and developing a tool to model different mitigation scenarios — effectively a testing ground for policy choices before resources are committed to them.

The report doesn't single out potatoes, but the sector sits inside the same national inventory as every other crop and livestock category it describes. Better activity data and country-specific emission factors mean that whatever a grower is producing, the numbers attached to that production are more likely to reflect Chilean growing conditions rather than generic international assumptions.

That matters directly for producers navigating a carbon-neutrality mandate that runs to 2050. As mitigation scenario tools mature, the sub-sectors with the clearest, most defensible emissions data are the ones best positioned to demonstrate progress — or to avoid being assigned outsized responsibility based on rough estimates rather than measured activity.