The overall objective of Re-Livestock is to understand and mobilize adoption of innovative practices, applied cross-scale (animal, herd/farm, sector and region), to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of livestock farming and to increase the capacity for dealing with climate change impacts, in order to ultimately increase the overall resilience of the livestock sector.
To reach this aim, the consortium has brought together scientific excellence and technical expertise, from across Europe and disciplines, to develop novel and scientifically supported integrated approaches targeted to different livestock systems and geographic regions in the context of climate change.
Strong collaboration with industry stakeholders and partners to identify the innovations and to co-design their validation will ensure relevance and will maximise the adoption of best practices.
National case studies and stakeholders forums, together with a European multi-actor platform, will allow for an engaged co-design of transition pathways by using unique food system models, whilst innovative experimental work will allow for the testing and sharing of the latest innovative solutions.
An ambitious communication strategy will extend the multi-actor approach to a broad range of stakeholders to create a community of practice. Learn more, go to the project website.
The objectives of Re-Livestock
- To improve the sustainability of feeding resources for livestock across European regions through:
- Lowering the carbon (C) footprint by reducing inputs and enhancing circularity in the food system
- Optimising the use of grasslands with the aim to reduce the overall GHG emissions
- Evaluating mitigation approaches and applicability across different European regions
- Defining and improving the resilience of feed resources and animals to the effects of climate change
- To accelerate the development and application of new breeding tools and strategies to achieve permanent and timely reductions in GHG emissions and adaptation to climate change through:
- Defining the best animal traits for mitigation of and adaptation to climate change
- Using systems biology to develop new genetic evaluation models and design new breeding strategies
- To evaluate system specific farm-level husbandry practices to reduce net GHG emissions and increase adaptation to different scenarios through:
- Re-defining housing and management strategies
- Promoting practices aimed at recycling nutrients and enhancing C sequestration - Using precision livestock farming (PLF) data to support decision-making
- To refine and apply innovative holistic farm-scale environmental and socio-economic assessment tools to enhance the adoption of the practices through:
- Developing improved life cycle assessment (LCA) based indicators, including the assessment of natural C sinks and animal welfare
- Identifying mitigation and adaptation measures that minimise environmental impacts whilst maintaining farm profitability under current and future climate scenarios
- To enable the resilience of livestock production systems today and in the future under different climatic scenarios from regional to global scale by adopting innovations based on circularity principles:
- Developing a suite of models to explore the option space to redesign European livestock production to be more resilient to climate change
- Exploring the consequences of combining and scaling-out mitigation and adaptation practices from landscape to global scale
- To design action-based pathways for the transition towards resilient livestock farming systems through:
- Evaluating potential adoption of tested technologies and practices in different livestock systems, and geographical and socio-economic contexts
- Identifying socio-economic, governance and institutional action-based priorities for mitigation and adaptation mobilization in the European livestock farming sector
- To understand the factors influencing the adoption and efficacy of mitigation and adaptation practices with multi-actor engagement through:
- Enabling co-innovation through providing interactive stakeholder forums and designing case studies