Making the Invisible Visible: 4 Ways Koltiva Transform Emissions Monitoring Across Food Supply Chains
- Gusi Ayu Putri Chandrika Sari
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
Editor’s Note
At Koltiva, we see how food and agriculture sit at the heart of the climate challenge, driving nearly one-third of global emissions while still lacking the reliable data needed for real action. In this article, we unpack our solutions: why monitoring matters, where companies struggle, and how Koltiva’s climate innovations make emissions visible, verifiable, and actionable. With added insights from Dimas Perceka, our Remote Sensing and Climate Lead, we show how agribusinesses and food companies can protect market access, build resilience, and lead the way toward climate-smart agriculture.
Executive Summary
Food and agriculture account for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with land-use change and farming contributing far more than transportation’s 5%. The sector also drives around 75% of global deforestation, making it one of the biggest climate challenges of our time.
Yet companies still face major blind spots. Most tools only offer aggregate estimates, leaving gaps in land-use emissions, farm practices, and carbon storage. These gaps not only slow progress but also expose agribusinesses to compliance, financial, and reputational risks.
Koltiva addresses these challenges by combining geospatial intelligence with ground-truthed data from producers. Through KoltiTrace MIS and solutions like the Agricarbon Tracker, Land Use Tracker, and Cool Farm Tool integration, we deliver climate insights that are visible, verifiable, and actionable, empowering agribusinesses to meet global sustainability standards and lead the shift toward climate-smart agriculture.
Table of Contents:
Editor’s Note
Executive Summary
Tracing the True Sources of Emissions Across Agriculture
Why Monitoring and Reporting Are Non-Negotiable
The Pain Points in Climate Impact Assessment
The Need for the Right Tools and Methods
Land Use Tracker (GHG Module)
Land Use Tracker (EUDR Module)
Cool Farm Tool Integration
Agricarbon Tracker
Technology Meets Reality: The Power of Ground Truthing
Turning Invisible Emissions into Actionable Plans
Nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from the way we produce and consume food. From land-use change to farming, processing, and packaging, food systems account for more emissions than all transportation combined. In fact, transport contributes only about 5% of food’s footprint, while land use and production dominate (Our World in Data, 2022).
This is no surprise when half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, often at the cost of forests and ecosystems. At least 75% of global deforestation is driven by agriculture, whether for crops, livestock, or commodity production (Earth.org, 2024). This causes around 25–30% of global GHG emissions, and when all agricultural products are included, the figure rises to one-third of total emissions (Our World in Data, 2021).
The message is clear: tackling climate change isn’t only about renewable energy or electric cars. It’s about how we grow, process, and move our food and whether we can monitor and manage those emissions effectively.
Tracing the True Sources of Emissions Across Agriculture
Food supply chains generate emissions in every stage of their operations, but certain segments contribute disproportionately. Identifying these hotspots is the first step toward designing effective, data-driven mitigation strategies.
Land Use – Deforestation, peatland degradation, fires, and emissions from cultivated soils.
Agricultural Production – Synthetic fertilizers (and the energy to produce them), manure, methane from livestock and rice, aquaculture, and farm machinery.
Supply Chain – Processing, packaging, transport, and refrigeration in retail.
Post-Retail – Household energy for storage and cooking, plus emissions from food waste.
Despite a clear understanding of these hotspots, most companies still struggle to translate knowledge into action. The primary barrier is the same across the industry: a lack of reliable, granular and verifiable data. Without it, identifying true emission sources, and reducing them, remains nearly impossible.
Why Monitoring and Reporting Are Non-Negotiable
Every sustainability commitment begins with one essential foundation: verified, reliable data. Companies cannot cut emissions or meet climate targets without first understanding the true scale and sources of their impact, and that clarity is only possible through rigorous monitoring and reporting. As a well-known principle in management states: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. For companies in food and agriculture, this translates directly into GHG emissions. Without precise, accurate and credible data in the monitoring and reporting, even the most ambitious climate strategies lack direction, accountability, and the ability to deliver real results.
Establish a baseline – Understand the current footprint of operations and supply chains.
Drive reductions – Identify hotspots and take targeted action to cut emissions.
Meet climate goals – Stay aligned with international targets, such as the Paris Agreement.
Ensure compliance – Keep pace with tightening regulations like the EU Effort Sharing Regulation (ESR) and provisions within the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), ISO 14068 and the SBTi FLAG guidance.
In short, monitoring is the foundation of both climate ambition and business resilience.
The Pain Points in Climate Impact Assessment (Why Companies Struggle)
While the need for monitoring is clear, putting it into practice remains a major challenge:
Lack of visibility – Agricultural supply chains are complex and fragmented, making emissions sources hard to track.
Scattered data – Too often, data is collected manually, inconsistently, or not at all.
Regulatory pressure – Frameworks like the EU ESR, CAP, CSRD, ISO 14068, and the SBTi FLAG and corporate sustainability directives require accurate, verifiable data and failure to deliver it means losing trust and fines.
Missed opportunities – Without insights, companies can’t identify where climate-smart practices could reduce emissions, strengthen farmer resilience, and unlock new markets.
What’s missing are tools that make emissions visible, verifiable, and actionable.
The Need for the Right Tools and Methods
At Koltiva, we believe overcoming these challenges requires more than spreadsheets and assumptions. It demands climate solutions that integrate advanced technology with field-level expertise. That’s why we built a robust GHG assessment framework within our KoltiTrace MIS platform, consisting of three core innovations.
Land Use Tracker (LUT)
One of the biggest blind spots for companies is land-use change emissions, which most tools only estimate in aggregate, leaving businesses exposed to regulatory and reputational risks. To close this gap, we developed our Land Use Tracker (LUT), integrated into KoltiTrace MIS and designed for both experts and non-specialists. With interactive maps, filters, and statistical insights, LUT makes land-use emissions visible and actionable.
We offer two specialized modules:
LUT Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Module
This module tracks land-use change and its associated emissions, providing a transparent view of deforestation-related GHG impacts across the supply chain. It:
Shows historical and current land-use change emissions from productive farms for any crop.
Applies best-practice methods (Quantis 2019, GHG Protocol & SBTi FLAG 2022, and IPCC).
Incorporates regional carbon stock data and post-deforestation perennial crops, and emissions such as CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ — the key agricultural greenhouse gases.
The result: companies can connect land-use change directly to their productive phases, ensuring emissions are fully traceable and aligned with global standards.
You can also read about the key feature and how it works here:
LUT EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) Module
For companies exporting to the EU, compliance with the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) is now a business-critical requirement. The LUT EUDR module is fully aligned with this regulation. It:
o Automatic deforestation checks use a blend of open-source datasets and Koltiva’s machine learning–powered deforestation map to track both historical and ongoing forest loss. To strengthen confidence, results can be cross-checked against established datasets like JRC, GFW, and SBTN.
o Monitors trends over time, providing a clear picture of forest areas, farm polygons, deforestation risks, and compliance status.
o Verifies legality by overlaying farm polygons with official government land-use maps and global protected-area data.
o Strengthens reliability with a desktop verification tool, enabling manual review of high-resolution imagery to confirm alerts and minimize false positives.
This means businesses can prove their supply chains are legal, deforestation-free, and EUDR-compliant, backed by transparent, verifiable evidence.
Cool Farm Tool Integration
One of the biggest challenges in food supply chains is that emissions data is often fragmented and overly aggregated. Companies may know their total footprint but lack visibility into which farms, crops, or practices drive emissions. What really matters is farm-level visibility: understanding exactly how seeds, soils, fertilizers, and residues contribute to emissions in real supply chains.
As our Remote Sensing and Climate Lead, Dimas Perceka explains: “Carbon data is often scattered and incomplete—farm-level details like fertilizer, manure, energy, or transport are rarely tracked in a structured way. As a result, most companies only see aggregated numbers, without knowing which farms, crops, or activities are the biggest emission hotspots. And even when data exists, it’s difficult to compare suppliers or decide which practices will cut emissions most cost-effectively. At the same time, pressure is rising from buyers, regulators, and investors. Reports must now be credible, consistent, and aligned with global standards.”
Integrating the Cool Farm Tool (CFT), the globally recognized GHG calculator that follows the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology, into KoltiTrace MIS brings this precision into practice. It:
Captures farm-level practices including from seed and feed production, residue management, fertilizers, and crop protection to carbon stock changes, energy use, transport, yields, soil, and climate conditions.
Calculates emissions across gases (CO₂, CH₄, N₂O) expressed as CO₂e, following the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines, including changes from land use and carbon stocks, enabling companies to track both emissions and removals at the farm level.
Direct farmer input through KoltiTrace FarmXtension surveys ensures data quality, while real-time dashboards benchmark suppliers, highlight hotspots, and calculate emissions per ton of raw material.
Drives climate strategy by identifying the most cost-effective opportunities to reduce on-farm emissions, supporting credible Scope 3 reporting and helping companies and farmers align with international sustainability standards.
Agricarbon Tracker (ACT)
Understanding emissions is only half the equation. Companies also need reliable ways to measure carbon storage and sequestration potential across their landscapes. The Agricarbon Tracker (ACT) provides that visibility, with geospatial models that estimate biomass and carbon stocks at scale.
ACT is a geospatial visualization tool built to provide highly relevant biomass and carbon stock estimates for agricultural and forest ecosystems. At its core is Koltiva’s s Above-Ground Biomass Density (AGBD) model, developed to provide medium-resolution estimates of biomass and carbon stock.
Why does this matter? Above-ground carbon stock is a critical metric for climate monitoring, ensuring zero-deforestation compliance, and supporting regenerative agriculture. Unlike generic biomass tools, our model is purpose-built for agricultural and forest ecosystems, making it highly relevant and precise for sustainability stakeholders.
Powered by advanced data sources — Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery, GEDI LiDAR, and Digital Elevation Models — to measure vegetation structure and density and translate that into biomass and carbon stock metrics. Biomass tells us how much living plant material is present in a given area, while carbon stock reflects how much carbon is stored in that vegetation.
Actionable insights for sustainability: Tracks deforestation, quantifies carbon loss, and identifies carbon sequestration opportunities, enabling credible climate strategies.
Enables carbon project design: Agribusinesses can compare carbon storage in existing farm plots with nearby restoration areas, guiding the design of reforestation or regenerative agriculture programs that offset supply chain emissions and enhance biodiversity.
Technology Meets Reality: The Power of Ground Truthing
Advanced satellite and digital tools are essential. But without field validation, their outputs can be challenged. Ground truthing closes that gap, turning digital insights into evidence that regulators, investors, and companies can trust.
In practice, this means pairing geospatial monitoring with field-level data collection. Koltiva enables this through the FarmXtension mobile survey app, used by field agents and agronomists on smartphones and tablets. Agents collect farm-level information directly from producers, either through interviews or direct measurements. The survey captures a full spectrum of data for emissions and sustainability analysis, from soil classification and residue management to fertilizer use, energy, water, transport, and land use.
Once submitted, survey data is automatically quality-checked in the system. Incomplete, inconsistent, or unrealistic inputs are flagged, and agents are prompted to correct them on the spot. This ensures that only high-quality, reliable data is passed on. Validated datasets then flow via API into KoltiTrace and integrate with the Cool Farm Tool for greenhouse gas calculations, producing accurate, verifiable, and defensible results that can withstand regulatory and investor scrutiny — while also driving meaningful improvements in supply chain sustainability.
In summary, the mobile app allows us to capture accurate farm-level information directly from the source, validate it on the spot, and then prepare it for calculation. This makes the entire process scalable, credible, and efficient, even when working with thousands of smallholder farmers across multiple regions.
Turning Invisible Emissions into Actionable Plans
By adopting Quantis and IPCC methodologies, our emission monitoring system ensures accurate, transparent, and globally aligned data. This approach complies with key regulations such as EU ESR, CAP, CSRD, ISO 14068, and the SBTi FLAG guidance. It builds credibility and trust with regulators, investors, and business partners alike. Beyond compliance, the system empowers companies to stay competitive and future-ready in the face of evolving climate regulations.
But more than that, we empower food and agriculture companies to act. With emissions hotspots made visible, businesses can:
Protect market access
Build trust with regulators and investors
Identify climate-smart practices
Future-proof their supply chains
The climate clock is ticking. Companies that measure, manage, and reduce emissions will lead the way. Those that don’t risk being left behind.
At Koltiva, we are committed to making emissions transparent, traceable, and actionable—so agribusinesses can build resilient, compliant, and climate-smart supply chains. Are you ready to turn invisible emissions into visible action?
Author: Gusi Ayu Putri Chandrika Sari, Social Media Specialist
Subject Expert Matters: Dimas Perceka, Remote Sensing & Climate Lead
Gusi Ayu Putri Chandrika Sari combines her expertise in digital marketing and social media with a deep commitment to sustainability, supported by over eight years of experience in communications. Her work focuses on crafting impactful narratives that connect technology, agriculture, and environmental responsibility. She is driven by a passion for promoting sustainable practices through compelling, audience-focused content across a variety of digital platforms.
Dimas Perceka is a dedicated GIS Developer with a Master of Engineering, currently contributing to geospatial innovation at Koltiva. He brings deep expertise in spatial data management, remote sensing, satellite imagery analysis, and climate change monitoring. Dimas excels in building scalable spatial databases, developing web GIS applications. With a strong foundation in spatial analytics, he supports multi-stakeholder projects focused on sustainable development and digital traceability. Known for his adaptability and collaborative mindset, Dimas thrives in dynamic environments that demand precision, innovation, and impact.
Resources:
Peterson, J. (2024, February 22). How animal agriculture is accelerating global deforestation. Earth.org. https://earth.org/how-animal-agriculture-is-accelerating-global-deforestation/
Ritchie, H., Rosado, P., & Roser, M. (2022). Environmental impacts of food production. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Ritchie, H. (2021). How much of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food? Our World in Data. https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20251125-173858/greenhouse-gas-emissions-food.html (Archived November 25, 2025).
