The world is facing unprecedented challenges characterized by the COVID 19 pandemic, frequencies of extreme climate-related disasters such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, among others.

These events have had a massive impact on the food security provisions of many worldwide, especially as the human population continues growing. 

Livestock products, milk, meat and eggs, have been taunted to increase the dietary needs of the growing population in developing countries and improve household incomes and livelihoods. 

However, increasingly, livestock production systems have faced growing criticism because of their contribution to climate change, water and air pollution, and loss of biodiversity.  

Globally, livestock contribute to total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (14.5%), mainly in the form of methane (CH₄) from enteric fermentation and manure management systems, which represents around 44% of the total. Other forms include carbon dioxide (CO₂) from land-use change and burning of fuels and nitrous oxides (N₂O) from fertilizers.

While livestock production systems continue to show economic, social and cultural relevance, it is crucial to improve their sustainability for the future generation. This, therefore, begs the question, which solutions are needed to maintain or increase livestock productivity while reducing associated GHG emissions.  

Noting the heterogeneity of livestock systems and differences in existing mitigation strategies across regions and farming systems, since 2012, the partners of the FAO LEAP partnership have developed guidelines to quantify GHG emissions from the livestock sector necessary to analyse mitigation scenarios. Currently, the FAO LEAP partnership is conducting the methane assessment from agri-food systems.

Different stakeholders have undertaken to conduct their environmental assessment for the livestock sector and contributed to their testing across different systems. The results of these processes have been documented in the recently launched FAO LEAP catalogue of applications. This catalogue includes 17 application cases and provides evidence-based climate and environmental solutions while highlighting the economic and environmental co-benefits.

Explore more on the FAO LEAP catalogue of applications at  https://www.fao.org/partnerships/leap/applications/en/