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A review of indicators and methods to assess biodiversity - Application to livestock production at global scale

Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership








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    Book (stand-alone)
    Principles for the assessment of livestock impacts on biodiversity 2016
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    The provision of guidance for the quantitative assessment of biodiversity in live¬stock and other sectors is an emerging area of work. This document represents an initial step in which international experts with various backgrounds shared their views on biodiversity assessment. The general objective of this document was to de-velop principles applicable to different assessment methods in order to guarantee a minimum level of soundness, transparency, scientific relevance, and completeness. These principles can be used to identify crucial elements of livestock systems that affect biodiversity, to monitor changes and make improvements, and to produce assessment results for internal or external communication.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Biodiversity and the livestock sector - Guidelines for quantitative assessment
    Version 1
    2020
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    The Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on biodiversity, hereafter called Biodiversity TAG, is composed of 25 international experts in ecology, biodiversity indicators, agronomy, life cycle assessment, livestock production systems, and environmental science. Their backgrounds, complementary between systems and regions, allowed them to understand and address different perspectives. The aim of the methodology developed in these guidelines is to introduce a harmonized international approach for assessing the impacts of livestock on biodiversity. The livestock sector is a major user of natural resources (land in particular) and an important contributor to pollution (e.g. causing nutrient losses, increasing greenhouse gas emissions), which makes it one of the sectors with the highest impact on biodiversity. At the same time, livestock production is one of the few sectors with not only negative but also positive impacts on biodiversity; therefore, the sector can pull two levers to improve its biodiversity performance – mitigate harm and maximize benefits. Many environmental assessments of the livestock sector have not addressed biodiversity because of its intrinsic complexity. These guidelines strive to include biodiversity in environmental assessments, in order to increase the understanding of the impacts of livestock on biodiversity and to reveal possible synergies or trade-offs with other environmental criteria or Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Several indicators in these guidelines are also of relevance for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
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    Document
    Biocultural Community Protocols for Livestock Keepers 2010
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    Biocultural Community Protocols are a new approach that provides livestock-keeping communities the opportunity of documenting and showcasing their role in the management of animal genetic resources and agro-ecosystems. They offer insights into the all-important socio-cultural dimensions of livestock diversity that have remained invisible during standard livestock research on animal genetic resources. They provide an opportunity for communities to tell the story from their perspective and bring t o light issues that researchers and development workers have not paid attention to so far. They describe the ritual and ceremonial meaning of livestock, they document traditional resource management and drought adaptation strategies, they identify the factors that may have led to the decline of a breed, and they make specific requests to outsiders for recognition of their role as custodians of biological diversity. Establishment of a biocultural community protocol involves a facilitated process in which a community or group of livestock keepers reflects about the meaning of their breeds, their own role in maintaining it and their vision and concerns for and about the future. The reflections are put on paper, and the community is informed about existing national rules and international legal frameworks that support its role in biodiversity conservation. Although the number of biocultural community protocols that has been established by livestock keepers is still limited, they have alrea dy validated the concept and there is an enormous interest among other communities in developing their protocols. Biocultural community protocols contribute to the implementation of several international frameworks. The most important of these are the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Plan of Action for Animal Genetic Resources. They also correspond to and implement the provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People as well as the Voluntary Guidelines to S upport the Progressive Realization of the Right to Adequate Food in the Context of National Food Security. Furthermore, they may provide an answer to the increasingly debated question of how to protect the rights of small-scale livestock keepers in a global scenario in which Intellectual Property Rights become ever more prevalent in animal breeding. At community level, the development of biocultural community protocols strengthens interest in the conservation of indigenous livestock breeds and i nitiates a discussion about how to deal with factors undermining conservation

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