Livestock, methane, and climate change: The politics of global assessments

Abstract

The relationship between livestock production and climate change is the subject of hot debate, with arguments for major shifts in diets and a reduction in livestock production. This Perspective examines how global assessments of livestock-derived methane emissions are framed, identifying assumptions and data gaps that influence standard life-cycle analysis approaches. These include inadequate data due to a focus on industrial not extensive systems; errors arising due to inappropriate emission factors being applied; questions of how global warming potentials are derived for different greenhouse gases and debates about what baselines are appropriate. The article argues for a holistic systems approach that takes account of diverse livestock systems-both intensive and extensive-including both positive and negative impacts. In particular, the potential benefits of extensive livestock systems are highlighted, including supporting livelihoods, providing high-quality nutrition, enhancing biodiversity, protecting landscapes, and sequestering carbon. By failing to differentiate between livestock systems, global assessments may mislead. Inappropriate measurement, verification and reporting processes linked to global climate change policy may in turn result in interventions that can undermine the livelihoods of extensive livestock-keepers in marginal areas, including mobile pastoralists. In the politics of global assessments, certain interests promote framings of the livestock-climate challenge in favour of contained, intensive systems, and the conversion of extensive rangelands into conservation investments. Emerging from a narrow, aggregated scientific framing, global assessments therefore can have political consequences. A more disaggregated, nuanced approach is required if the future of food and climate change is to be effectively addressed.

Recognizing the equity implications of restoration priority maps

“…Relatedly, it is important to critically evaluate the data inputs to global environmental assessments [70]. The various decisions we highlight above should, on equity grounds, consider the interests and welfare of affected communities [35,71], but omitting relevant social data makes doing so impossible.…”

Pastoralism and Tourism in Eastern Africa—Quantitative Analysis from 2004 to 2018

“…In rangelands, competition between wildlife and livestock can pose ecological and economic challenges. Wildlife may offer opportunities for supplementary-or even main-income generation and may provide an alternative to livestock production, but it may bring about increasing competition for resources (water, pasture, and migration routes), and the decline in wildlife habitats leads to increased wildlife-livestock-human conflicts due to damage caused by livestock, humans, and wildlife to each other [13,[40][41][42].…”

“…However, as our analysis shows, this may not be economically viable, as the size of pastoralist rangelands positively relates the total value added by pastoralism, which, in turn, positively relates to GDP. On the other hand, former research indicates that pastoralists are efficient conservationists, using the environmentally unfavorable drylands in a way that they can use the same areas from year to year, maintaining their conditions in a sustainable way [22,36,40].…”

Herbivory baseline estimates in Spanish Protected Areas, and environmental implications.

“…At this point, herbivory baselines, i.e. potential ecosystem effects from wild herbivory, must be calculated to evaluate strategies that aim to reduce either global warming, biodiversity loss or other land-use-associated impacts(Manzano and White 2019;Scoones 2022). Challenges for estimating herbivore baselines Our results are constrained by a signi cant degree of uncertainty, and there is still room to re ne methodologies -e.g.…”