The elephant in the room – or is it a cow?
Apr 26th, 2012 | By Caitlin Peterson | Category: Climate Change, Feature Articles, mitigation
We can no longer afford to ignore the substantial role that livestock plays in climate change. Photo by: ILRI
Of all the sectors contributing to anthropological greenhouse gas emissions, the livestock sector has been the most consistently difficult to pin down. How does one actually measure emissions from a living, changing animal? Do you count the CO2 they exhale with every breath? What about all the rainforest that’s been chopped down to accommodate pasture land, do you count that, too? With the wide range of estimates for livestock’s contribution to GHGs and the ongoing argument as to which production systems are the most sustainable, it’s no wonder livestock often gets left out of the mitigation discussion altogether.
Silvo-pastoral systems like this one have the potential to transform the growing ecological hoofprint of livestock production systems. Photo by: Neil Palmer.
Jarvis challenged those present at April’s meeting to look at the livestock ‘hoofprint’ as an opportunity as much as a call to immediate action. “Developing countries are where it’s at! They have the biggest potential for mitigation and major system transformations. There are systems which are far more efficient than others, and developing nations have the ability to put the rest of the world to shame.” Intensive silvo-pastoral systems, for example, were highlighted as having catalyzed a mini-revolution in Colombia and Central America due to their high CO2 capture potential and low implementation costs. According to Jarvis they are the rare climate change win-win, converting degraded pasture land into profitable, productive systems with high carbon stock, biodiversity, and resilience.
It is likely that livestock will continue to be a contentious subject in the climate change discussion. Indeed, any vestige of consensus was slow to emerge at the IADG meeting; the numbers game remains fraught with quibbles and knowledge gaps, and developed nations are keen to defend the efficiency of their production systems. But the bottom line remains the same: livestock will have an increasingly larger share of global greenhouse emissions in the near future unless serious action is taken. That said, the right mix of targeted research, informed policy, and appropriate technology could make the sector into one of the success stories of global climate change mitigation.
There is a great debate to be had regarding the accuracy of any GHG accounting process and this is unusually complicated when dealing with livestock. However, the critical question is actually one of settling upon a usable methodology for GHG accounting and updating it to tweak accuracy over time.
The problem of defining such a methodology is solved, in my view. The challenge is implementation. DairyCo in Great Britain and at a similar time the FAO/IDF published guidelines describing just such methodologies for dairy cattle – this methodology has been readily adapted for other livestock.
For example, DairyCo (milk in GB) and Bord Bia (beef in the Republic of Ireland) have implemented programmes to analyse and act on milk and beef GHG emissions at the national level, using data from actual farms. As an independent certification body the Carbon Trust has been involved in ensuring that the methodologies are indeed implemented correctly.
Doing analysis at this scale, linking farms with national policy and research programmes enables integrated decision making and options to investigate the impact of grazing policy, biodiversity, water use etc.
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You are basically right about this; but with one nunace.If the scientific consensus is correct (I am not qualified to say whether it is or not, so I shall accept their professional judgement) then the impact of climate change on the poorest countries is going to be immense. Entire countries may become unsustainable. The number of hugely distressed people trying to move from where they are to somewhere they can live is going to be enormous.In this sense, tackling climate change complements tackling poverty. Unless we tackle climate change, the future scale, breadth, depth and nature of poverty will change out of all recognition.