Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options
The in-depth assessment presented in this document of the various significant impacts of the world’s livestock sector on the environment is deliberately termed Livestock’s long shadow so as to help raise the attention of both the technical and the general public to the very substantial contribution of animal agriculture to climate change and air pollution, to land, soil and water degradation and to the reduction of biodiversity. This is not done simply to blame the rapidly growing and intensifying global livestock sector for severely damaging the environment but to encourage decisive measures at the technical and political levels for mitigating such damage. The detailed assessment of the various environmental impacts of the sector is therefore associated with the outline of technical and policy- related action to address these impacts.
The assessment builds on the work of the Livestock, Environment and Development (LEAD) Initiative. This multi-stakeholder Initiative, coordinated by FAO’s Animal Production and Health Division, was formed to address the environmental consequences of livestock production, particularly in the light of rising demand for food products of animal origin and the increasing pressure on natural resources. The LEAD Initiative brought together a broad range of research and development institutions and individuals interested in livestock–environment interactions; it has been active in a number of areas of particular concern, i.e. in land and water pollution from intensive livestock production in land degradation from overgrazing in dry lands and in livestock-induced deforestation in the humid and subhumid tropics.
While previous assessments of the livestock–environment interactions by LEAD have adopted a livestock sector perspective, i.e. investigated the impacts of the sector on the natural resources used in animal production, the current assessment sets off from the environment and determines the contribution of livestock to changes to the environment (land use and climate change, soil, water and biodiversity depletion). The benefit of this change in perspective is substantial in that it provides the framework for gauging the sig- nificant and dynamic role of the livestock sector in driving global environmental change. This in turn should assist and enhance decision-making on necessary action at all levels, from local to global, from private to public, from individual to corporate and from non- governmental to intergovernmental. Action is required: if, as predicted, the production of meat will double from now to 2050, we need to halve impacts per unit of output to achieve a mere status quo in overall impact.
LEAD has been catalyzing such action, supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and other donors, in a range of livestock-induced environmental “hotspots”, such as in East and Southeast Asia where solutions are designed for the sustainable management of the very large quantities of livestock waste in intensive animal production, such as in Central America where new procedures are introduced for the payment of environmental services in livestock-based land use, and such as in the United Republic of Tanzania where sustainable wildlife–livestock interactions are designed. Such efforts require decisions on, and enforcement of, suitable policy instruments for enabling stakeholder engagement in economically sustainable resource use that addresses the environmental concerns at stake.
It is obvious that the responsibility for the necessary action to address the environmental damage by the livestock sector goes far beyond the sector; it also goes beyond agriculture. While the sector, and agriculture as a whole, have to live up to the challenge of finding suitable technical solutions for more environmentally sustainable resource use in animal agriculture, the decisions concerning their use clearly transcend agriculture; multisector and multiobjective decision-making is required.
It is hoped that this assessment contributes to such decision-making and to thus shrink “Livestock’s long shadow ”.
