The Key Role of Production Efficiency Changes in Livestock Methane Emission Mitigation
Abstract
The livestock sector is the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions and is projected to increase in the future with the increased demand for livestock products. Here, we compare livestock methane emissions and emission intensities, defined by the amount of methane emitted per unit of animal proteins, estimated by different methodologies, and identify mitigation potentials in different regions of the world based on possible future projections. We show that emission intensity decreased for most livestock categories globally during 2000–2018, due to an increasing protein-production efficiency, and the IPCC Tier 2 method should be used for capturing the temporal changes in the emission intensities. We further show that efforts on the demand-side to promote balanced, healthy, and environmentally sustainable diets in most countries will not be sufficient to mitigate livestock methane emissions without parallel efforts to improve production efficiency. The latter efforts have much greater mitigating effects than demand-side efforts, and hence should be prioritized in a few developing countries that contribute most of the mitigation potential.
Additional Information
© 2021. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Issue Online: 26 May 2021; Version of Record online: 26 May 2021; Manuscript accepted: 02 April 2021; Manuscript revised: 29 March 2021; Manuscript received: 23 January 2021. Jinfeng Chang is supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA26010303). Philippe Ciais acknowledges support from the CLAND Convergence Institute of the French National Research Agency (ANR). Mario Herrero acknowledges funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the MERLIN project (INV-023682). The authors declare no conflict of interest. Data Availability Statement: The data used in this study are available in the Supporting Information. The raw data are from the FAO: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data and http://www.fao.org/global-perspectives-studies/food-agriculture-projections-to-2050/en/. The results of this study, and the R code and the parameter files used to produce them are available at following website: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4663448.Attached Files
Published - 2021AV000391.pdf
Accepted Version - 2021av000391-sup-0004-_first_revision_of_manuscript-s03.pdf
Submitted - 2021av000391-sup-0002-original_version_of_manuscript-s01.pdf
Submitted - essoar.10506703.1.pdf
Supplemental Material - 2021av000391-sup-0001-supporting_information_si-s01.docx
Supplemental Material - 2021av000391-sup-0003-_peer_review_history-s02.pdf
Supplemental Material - 2021av000391-sup-0005-_authors_response_to_peer_review_comments-s04.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 108735
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210414-145511582
- XDA26010303
- Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Agence Nationale pour la Recherche (ANR)
- INV-023682
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Created
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2021-04-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-05-27Created from EPrint's last_modified field