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The in-depth assessment of the various significant impacts of the world’s livestock sector on the environment is deliberately termed Livestock’s long shadow so as to help raise the attention of both the technical and the general public to the very substantial contribution of animal agriculture to climate change and air pollution, to land, soil and water degradation and to the reduction of biodiversity.
This is not done simply to blame the rapidly growing and intensifying global livestock sector for severely damaging the environment but to encourage decisive measures at the technical and political levels for mitigating such damage. The detailed assessment of the various environmental impacts of the sector is therefore associated with the outline of technical and policy related action to address these impacts.
The assessment sets off from the environment and determines the contribution of livestock to changes to the environment (land use and climate change, soil, water and biodiversity depletion).
Arguably, climate change is the most serious human-made environmental issue, and is now moving at unprecedented magnitude and speed. When taking into account the entire livestock commodity chain, from land use and feed production over livestock production to livestock waste and product processing, about 18 percent of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the livestock sector.
Along the animal food chain, main sources of emissions are:
- Land use and land use change: 2.5 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent; including forest and other natural vegetation replaced by pasture and feed crop in the Neotropics (CO2) and carbon release from soils such as pasture and arable land dedicated to feed production (CO2)
- Feed Production (except carbon released from soil): 0.4 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, including fossil fuel used in manufacturing chemical fertilizer for feed crops (CO2) and chemical fertilizer application on feedcrops and leguminous feed crop (N2O, NH3)
- Animal production: 1.9 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, including enteric fermentation from ruminants (CH4) and on-farm fossil fuel use (CO2)
- Manure Management: 2.2 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent, mainly through manure storage, application and deposition (CH4, N2O, NH3)
Processing and international transport: 0.03 Giga tonnes CO2 equivalent
Action is required: if, as predicted, the production of meat will double from now to 2050, we need to halve impacts per unit of output to achieve a mere status quo in overall impact. It is obvious that the responsibility for the necessary action to address the environmental damage by the livestock sector goes far beyond the sector; it also goes beyond agriculture.
While the sector, and agriculture as a whole, have to live up to the challenge of finding suitable technical solutions for more environmentally sustainable resource use in animal agriculture, the decisions concerning their use clearly transcend agriculture; multisector and multiobjective decision-making is required.
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