This article is brought to you by the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) Impact Program.
Livestock supports at least 1.3 billion people around the world and provides nutritional security to many more.
But it’s also one of the most environmentally damaging sectors – responsible for significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and biodiversity loss.
With demand for animal-based foods such as meat and dairy expected to increase by up to 70 percent by 2050, the challenge is clear: how can we increase production while protecting and restoring our planet?
From the peatlands of Ukraine to the Brazilian Cerrado, teams of scientists and farmers are working together to do just that – discovering how to change livestock from a climate problem to a climate solution.
To facilitate cooperation between them, the Food Systems, Land Use and Restoration (FOLUR) Impact Program recently held a Regional Dialogue in Brasília, Brazil.
The dialogue brought together the private sector, NGOs and FOLUR country representatives, including the government of Brazil, to share stories of success as well as ongoing challenges.
Livestock includes animals such as pigs, goats, poultry and cattle. They are primarily used for food, with around 34 percent of the protein consumed globally coming from just three sources: milk, eggs and meat.
These goods also provide vital micronutrients such as iron, zinc, calcium and vitamin B12, which only occurs naturally in animal-based products.
“Livestock is important as a sector, providing essential food for humanity, for people across the world,” says Inna Hoch, national technical analyst at UNDP Ukraine.
“It provides essential food for people but also contributes to the financial stability of the country,” she continues.
In fact, livestock contributes around 40 percent of the global agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) – or about 1.4 percent of total global GDP.
On a local level, livestock is also a valuable asset that matures over time and acts as a kind of ‘bank account.’
Arnoud Hameleers, who leads the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s country office in Brazil, explains: “If you work with small farmers, they need a banking system, and livestock can be that.”
This is especially true for the roughly 500 million pastoralists and rangeland communities whose cultures and livelihoods are tied to livestock. In lower-income drylands, this ‘banked’ livestock can be an essential safety net, providing nutritional and financial security during crises such as climate shocks, droughts or personal emergencies.
However, livestock is also contributing to many of the crises it offers protection from.
According to some estimates, livestock value chains currently produce 14.5 percent of all of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Cattle are responsible for about two-thirds of those emissions, mainly in the form of methane – a greenhouse gas over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.
Agriculture as a whole is also the single largest driver of global deforestation, accounting for around three-quarters of tropical forest loss. Within livestock value chains, areas are deforested to create pasture to graze animals or expand cropland for feed plants.
Removing forest for livestock releases the carbon stored in the trees, and deforestation and forest degradation account for an estimated 11 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This also threatens biodiversity, soil health and water systems, undermining the very ecosystem services that agriculture requires for long-term viability.
“As global demand increases – and the need to address climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the loss of ecosystem services that support agriculture, forests and water storage increases – livestock is inevitably under the spotlight,” says Peter Goodman, senior agriculture economist at the World Bank and FOLUR program lead.
Santiago Fariña from Global Methane Hub tells us that to reduce emissions in livestock systems, we need to produce more efficiently.
“That means changing how they feed the animals, how they breed the animals, how they manage health and reproduction,” he says.
It also means intensifying current systems: producing more on less land to stop encroachment into wild spaces and reduce deforestation.
One potential solution for the livestock sector is regenerative grazing.
“It really means being flexible in how farming is actually conducted – thinking about the context, knowing your soil, your climatic environment, the realities that the farmer is facing,” says Julia Bolton, the regenerative agriculture and agri-forestry climate investment specialist at the IFC.
“But also trying to slowly make some of these improvements: reducing reliance on synthetic and chemical fertilizers, working with nature, trying to integrate crops, but doing it at a slower pace that minimizes the risk to the farmers.”
Women have a huge role to play in this transition, says Bolton. They’re often the people working on food production, so it’s vital to include them in the diversification of agriculture, she explains.
However, a gap remains between women working on the land while men own it. Some estimates suggest that in almost half of all countries, women are still unable to assert the same land and property rights as men.
What’s more, women often have additional unpaid responsibilities outside of the workplace.
Challenging this imbalance and strengthening the land rights of women can lead to social and economic benefits, including improved agricultural productivity, making it a key part of any sustainable food system.
As the world’s largest beef producer, Brazil is an important testing ground for new practices and a vital part of any global solution.
About half of Brazilian beef is produced in the Cerrado, the world’s biggest savanna and a biodiversity hotspot, where research into integrated crop–livestock-forestry systems is currently underway.
“Sustainable livestock in the Cerrado will be driven by using integrated systems in which we can combine grasses, cattle, animal crops and also trees in the same land area,” says Roberto Guimarães, a researcher at Embrapa.
This integrated approach could help farmers improve water systems and soil health while boosting the financial viability, he adds.
Unlike Brazil, the soil in Ukraine is wet, carbon-rich peatland that requires a completely different approach, says Hoch.
“Our aim as a project is to push forward traditional knowledge and push forward traditional pastures,” she explains.
This is being done thorough a practice called paludiculture, which is the cultivation of crops and trees on peatlands.
“[Paludiculture is the] sustainable use of wetlands as a mosaic landscape. When a specific variety of livestock can survive, cattle for example, the farmer will raise it,” says Hoch.
“When it is impossible, because the level of water is very high, [the land] would remain as intact wetlands – hotspots for biodiversity.”
This method takes a landscape approach, combining environmentally friendly production methods that also offer financially stability to farmers, Hoch says.
“This is our approach. This is not easy to implement, but it’s doable.”
In Mexico, 95 percent of deforestation is linked to agriculture, and 74 percent of that is due to livestock, says Mario Pérez, from the Ministry of Agriculture of Mexico.
There are also significant issues in animal health, with the New World screwworm impacting both domestic and export markets, says Pérez.
And the system that has caused these problems isn’t even benefiting the farmers as it has become unprofitable, says Leonel Zavaleta of Fondo Golfo de México AC.
“That is why good farming practices make a lot of sense,” Zavaleta explains. “Not only for the farmer’s wellbeing but to restore degraded land, to reduce emissions and to provide better conditions for the livestock.”
And they’re doing this by placing ecosystem services at the centre of their activities, says Zavaleta, creating “cross-cutting systems that have become a hub for knowledge exchange, bringing together ancestral cultural practices, traditions, youth, women and local producers.”
There is no question that current livestock systems are problematic, but not engaging with them isn’t going to help.
Livestock is a global sector, and different approaches will be needed – the tools that work in Mexican forests won’t necessarily apply to Ukrainian peatlands – but the Dialogue in Brazil showed there are many solutions already being implemented.
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