Challenges for the balanced attribution of livestock’s environmental impacts: the art of conveying simple messages around complex realities. By European Livestock Voice.

Meat production, particularly beef, is often cited as a major contributor to climate change due to its impact on methane emissions and land use, biodiversity loss, feed-food competition, and water scarcity. However, environmental assessments of livestock are frequently oversimplified, ignoring the complexities and variations within the sector.

For example, comparing livestock-associated greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, and N2O) using simplistic metrics like CO2-equivalents fails to account for their different atmospheric behaviours and kinetics. Methane (CH4) from livestock is part of a biological cycle and rapidly breaks down in the atmosphere, unlike CO2 mobilised from fossil fuel stores, which accumulates in the atmosphere. Given its short-lived nature, the GWP* metric has been developed to reflect CH4’s impact on warming accurately. This underlines that choosing the right metric in the function of the topic under scrutiny is paramount to having a fair and robust evaluation.

Assessments of land use, usage and pollution of water by livestock equally suffer from oversimplification. Adequate manners of livestock production can have multiple positive effects on both land and water resources, such as improving the organic soil carbon levels of degraded lands and valorising non-arable lands unsuitable for crop production. Managed livestock can enhance the water-holding capacity of soils and reduce the runoff of pollutants in waterways. Livestock, especially ruminants on grasslands, mostly use rainwater (which would fall anyway). Although water for feed irrigation can be problematic, this highly depends on the production context.

Finally, evaluations using environmental metrics should also consider the nutritional value of foods, not just their mass or caloric content. Nutritional life cycle assessments (nLCA) integrate nutrition and environmental impact estimates, highlighting the bioavailability and digestibility of nutrients from animal-based products compared to plant-based ones. conclusion, simplistic metrics fail to capture livestock production’s true impact and benefits. Assessing livestock products requires a multifaceted approach, considering their broader value in the food system, including aspects of nutrition, biodiversity, soil health, land stewardship, and community support.

See the full Paper by Pablo Manzano, Jason Rowntree, Logan Thompson, Agustín del Prado, Peer Ederer, Wilhelm Windisch, Michael R F Lee, “Challenges for the balanced attribution of livestock’s environmental impacts: the art of conveying simple messages around complex realities | Animal Frontiers | Oxford Academic (oup.com)“.