Mechanistic pathways connecting European food system emissions to sustainable development goals

Quantifying interdependencies between food system greenhouse gas emissions and Sustainable Development Goal progress is essential for European climate mitigation. Utilizing FAOSTAT and Eurostat data spanning 2010–2022 across seven European Union member states, this study operationalises energy decarbonisation under SDG 7, circular economy efficiency under SDGs 9.4 and 12, and climate policy integration under SDGs 2.4 and 13 as three mechanistic empirical pathways. Germany, France, and Italy generate 3,086,150 kilotons of carbon dioxide equivalent, representing 69% of total panel emissions, whereas Central and Eastern European member states exhibit elevated emission intensities. Ridge regression mitigates severe supply-chain multicollinearity, successfully reducing variance inflation factors to acceptable parameters. Empirical findings demonstrate that circular economy variables provide the primary explanatory power across targets, driven by strong linear associations between waste management and sustainable infrastructure. Energy-sector variables exhibit moderate explanatory strength, whereas climate policy variables demonstrate higher cross-country heterogeneity. One-year lag models confirm temporal precedence across four of seven targets at the 5% significance level, with a fifth target achieving marginal significance at the 10% level. A feasibility-weighted matrix identifies transport decarbonisation and waste management modernisation as high-impact, capital-intensive strategic priorities. Packaging innovation and processing efficiency represent high-feasibility operational measures, whereas consumer education yields no statistically significant effect over the 13-year period. These findings deliver an evidence-based framework for aligning production efficiency with demand governance across European contexts.