Pinpointing low environmental efficiency crops boosts pertinently regulating diversified agricultural environmental footprints

Crop production imposes various environmental burdens when feeding humanity. Targeting regional critical crops for effective environmental footprints regulation remains intractable especially when indicator-extended and localized environmental efficiencies of crops are unclear. This study pinpoints regional critical crops and extract potential regulation paths for diversified environmental footprints by tracing 12 types of life cycle environmental impacts of 15 crop species inflicted by 8 groups of activities, and evaluating magnitudes and multidimensional efficiencies (measured by crop yield, sown area, and economic value) of crops' footprints at the provincial scale in China. The complete quantitative links among activities, crops, impacts, and efficiencies in each region are presented. Sugarcane, sugar beet, and vegetables always demonstrate higher efficiencies measured by crop yield. Soybean shows the greatest efficiencies measured by sown area in all impact categories. Cash crops (such as tobacco and tea) and peanut are regularly more environmentally efficient when the measure shifts to economic value. For three measurements, rice consistently shows lower efficiency in Climate change due to methane emission. Fruits, with heavy pesticide input, have lower efficiencies in the ecotoxicity-related impacts. When both low efficiency and high contribution to footprints are integrated, fruits are identified as critical crops, primarily in the northwest and southwest, for Climate change and Ozone depletion. Wheat and maize are critical crops, mainly in the north, for Climate change and Photochemical oxidant formation. Targeting efficiency improvements in critical crops may yield mitigation outcomes comparable to those from improving all inefficient crops, with differences of less than 3.5% observed between the two scenarios. The extracted regulation paths covering explicit impact-region-crop-activity correspondence yield insights into more precise and cost-effective environmental footprints control for crop production.