Land Use, Livestock, Quantity Governance, and Economic Instruments—Sustainability Beyond Big Livestock Herds and Fossil Fuels

Abstract

The production of animal food products is (besides fossil fuels) one of the most important noxae with regard to many of the environmental problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss or globally disrupted nutrient cycles. This paper provides a qualitative governance analysis of which regulatory options there are to align livestock farming with the legally binding environmental objectives, in particular the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Two innovative governance approaches are developed and compared: a cap-and-trade scheme for animal products and a livestock-to-land ratio. Both instruments are measured against the above-mentioned environmental objectives, taking into account findings from behavioural sciences and typical governance problems. Both approaches are generally suitable as quantity governance in animal husbandry if they are properly designed. In the end, a combination of both approaches proved to be particularly effective ecologically. All of this simultaneously demonstrates, on the basis of a rarely considered but ecologically highly relevant sector, how a quantity governance approach that is based on an easily comprehensible governance unit can function across all sectors and regions.

Challenges of Food Waste Governance: An Assessment of European Legislation on Food Waste and Recommendations for Improvement by Economic Instruments

“…To this end, a multi-method governance analysis (or steering analysis) is applied. The analysis evaluates the impact of real or proposed governance instruments towards a given normative objective by taking findings of research on human behaviour and typical governance problems into account [11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Human Rights and Precautionary Principle: Limits to Geoengineering, SRM, and IPCC Scenarios

“…(1) Reduction in GHG emissions, which is mainly achieved by phasing out fossil fuels and globally minimizing livestock farming [5][6][7]. (2) Compensation of residual emissions by enhancing natural sink capacities in the land-use sector, specifically through forest management, rewetting of wetlands, and agricultural management [8][9][10][11].…”

“…Forest restoration and sustainable forest management (under certain conditions that avoid trade-offs also afforestation and reforestation) [24,25,[157][158][159], enhanced carbon sequestration in soils, stimulated by altered agricultural practices, i.e., agroforestry catch cropping, etc. [144,[160][161][162], and rewetting peatlands [163] are potential measures to enhance these capacities (on policy instruments for the land-use sector see in detail [5,6,9,144]). Even if certain trade-offs must also be taken into account, end-of-pipe solutions such as large-scale geoengineering measures do not solve other environmental problems, such as the progressing ecosystem degradation and acidification, which are also caused directly or indirectly by using fossil fuels.…”

“…However, in view of the urgency of the issue and the danger for human rights and their preconditions, relying on atmospheric SRM technologies is not merited. With regard to policy instruments for implementing these strategies, economic instruments that relate to major polluters-fossil fuels and livestock products-in line with the PA and the CBD remain the most promising solution [5,6,160,178].…”

Peatland Governance: The Problem of Depicting in Sustainability Governance, Regulatory Law, and Economic Instruments

“…These strategies would have to be supplemented by the above-mentioned overarching instruments, which reduce the intensification pressure in agriculture firstly in Europe but due to highly globalized feed and food markets also globally. Elsewhere, it has been shown that a cap-and-trade approach for fossil fuels with a cap of zero in about two decades and a cap-and-trade approach for livestock husbandry or an obligation to link livestock farming to the agricultural area on the farm area would be, combined with an increase in area-related taxes, the most effective instruments to reduce the land-use pressure (more precisely [9,24,32,143,144]). The fact that such approaches have to be combined with border adjustments in order to prevent shifting effects outside the EU has also been discussed elsewhere.…”