Livestock Production and Climate Change

Climate change is transforming the planet's ecosystems and threatening the well-being of current and future generations. To "hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius" and avoid "dangerous" climate change,2 deep cuts in global emissions are urgently required. The global livestock sector contributes a significant share to anthropogenic GHG emissions, but it can also deliver a significant share of the necessary mitigation effort. Concerted and collective action from all sector stakeholders is urgently required to ensure that existing and promising mitigation strategies are implemented. The need to reduce the sector's emissions and its environmental footprint has indeed become ever more pressing in view of its continuing expansion to ensure food security and feed a growing, richer and more urbanized world population. Technologies and practices that help reduce emissions exist but are not widely used. Their adoption and use by the bulk of the world's producers can result in significant reductions in emissions. Emission intensities (emissions per unit of animal product) vary greatly between production units, even within similar production systems. Different farming practices and supply chain management explain this variability. Within the gap between the production units with the lowest emission intensities and those with the highest emission intensities, lies an important potential for mitigation. A 30 percent reduction of GHG emissions would be possible, for example, if producers in a given system, region and climate adopted the technologies and practice currently used by the 10 percent of producers with the lowest emission intensity.