The FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership responded to an existing demand to advance towards a science-based benchmarking of the environmental performance of the livestock sector. This is how the FAO evaluation office salutes the multi-stakeholder partnership after the conduction of a two-month project evaluation covering the three phases of FAO LEAP from 2012 to 2021.

The evaluation confirmed that the importance of the multi-stakeholder partnership is still well visible today. According to the report, FAO LEAP was able to provide a neutral forum for discussion and negotiation on the livestock sector, encouraging dialogue and cooperation between stakeholder groups with different if not opposing interests. For about ten years, the Partnership contributed to build consensus on harmonized methods and metrics to assess the environmental performance of livestock. As a result, different stakeholders including governments and organizations representing the private sector, producers and pastoralists, have used FAO LEAP’s products and principles to improve decision-making and practices.

The Partnership’s holistic and integrated perspective has anticipated major global trends and the theory behind its design has been translated into practical actions. Thanks to a science-based approach, the guidelines and technical materials developed by FAO LEAP partners have been used in diverse countries, sectors and industries worldwide. And their application has enabled useful data generation, improvement of the environment, and in some cases increased productivity of the livestock sector. FAO LEAP assessments covered major matters, including greenhouse gas emissions and related carbon footprint, nutrient loss, resource depletion, water productivity and biodiversity.

The ability to constantly attract leading experts from different scientific communities demonstrated the added value of FAO LEAP over the first three phases of the project. And this is still true when it comes to the current fourth phase of the partnership (2022-2024) that mainly focuses on ecosystem services, circular bio-economy, leather supply chain, and land-use change. Despite the low participation of developing countries and the financial uncertainty faced by the project during most of its implementation period, FAO LEAP partners balanced existing asymmetries among livestock stakeholders with opposing interests. As a result, the multi-stakeholder partnership ensured an increasing involvement of all the groups and created synergies with other FAO initiatives, such as the FAO Committee on Agriculture’s Sub-Committee on Livestock and the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock.

After almost ten years, the FAO LEAP Partnership keeps building consensus on methods, metrics, and data to assess the environmental performance of the livestock sector. Its achievements continue to bring benefits to the international community, improving national-scale decisions, enabling farmers to participate in emission trading systems, and rewarding producers for their environmental performance. The report highlights that as the interest in livestock and environmental sustainability continues to grow, there are good prospects that the use of the FAO LEAP guidelines will also increase in the near future.

Read the full evaluation report.

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