Mitigating Emissions from Livestock Systems

The EU Effort Sharing Agreement and the Paris Agreement create challenging targets for GHG emission reductions and represent respectively short and long term existential threats to livestock production systems.

The MELS project will build on the Global Research Alliance DATAMAN project by collating additional data on emissions from manure management and activity /ancillary data. The data will be used to generate functional relationships between emissions and activity/ancillary variables, enabling a refinement of national inventories and better assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a range of mitigation measures. MELS will assess and recommend improvements to existing farm-scale decision support systems (DSSs) in relation to GHG emissions from livestock production systems, including grazing ruminants, by refining the calculations used to account for emissions. A prototype farm-scale DSS will be developed for countries lacking such a tool and implemented in at least one country. This will allow the consequences of mitigation strategies on emissions and costs to be more accurately quantified and better documented, both at the national and farm scales.