UC Irvine

The carbon footprint of embedded water in California's agricultural products has not been thoroughly studied before. However, related topics have been on the table to solve the sustainable development problems. This research tries to find out the energy consumption of the water embedded in the exported agricultural products from California. It also aims to figure out the nation scale distribution of the carbon footprint that was studied in this research. The results show that the water footprint of the agricultural products is around 22.3 Gm3 and the total carbon footprint is 8.9 million metric tons of CO2. The top three regions that have the highest water and carbon footprint are European Union 27, China, and Japan. We studied the carbon footprint by researching the water footprint of all the agricultural products. Based on the energy usage per unit water sources published by the California Energy Commission and the global average water footprint of agricultural products from previous work (Hoekstra, 2007), we calculated the carbon-equivalent of the agricultural products' carbon footprint. And based on the result that the carbon footprint of the embedded water of agricultural products is only 2% of the total carbon budget with the water footprint contributes to 25% of the total, we believe that California has performed well in managing the energy in agriculture-water area, but it still has improvement space in the management of the water resource.