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Biodiversity and the livestock sector

Summary of the guidelines for assessment

Year of publication 2020

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 2p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) Greenhouse gas emissions can be expressed as CO2 equivalence and water use in terms of litres consumed, but there is no single common unit to measure biodiversity because of its multivariate nature, context-specificity and because conservation priorities are subject to a societal value judgment. The intrinsic complexity of biodiversity may explain why it has been left out of many environmental assessments of the livestock sector. Yet, the impact of livestock on biodiversity needs to be measured to support policy development and sustainable management decisions. The Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership has tackled the challenge and published the guidelines on biodiversity with the objective to provide step-by-step recommendations for the quantitative assessment of the effects of livestock production on wild biodiversity, based on existing indicators and methods. The guidelines are relevant to a range of assessment objectives, users, scales, geographical regions, livestock species, and production systems.

Language English

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    Biodiversity and the livestock sector - Guidelines for quantitative assessment
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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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    Biodiversity and the livestock sector - Guidelines for quantitative assessment
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    The impact of livestock on biodiversity
    Summary of the guidelines for assessment
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    According to the last report of the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the current rate of species extinction is unprecedented in human history and is threatening human well-being as biodiversity is the basis for essential ecosystem services such as biomass production, crop pollination, water purification or climate regulation. Reversing species decline will require mainstreaming biodiversity across sectors and landscapes. Livestock is among the sectors with highest impacts on biodiversity. As a direct impact, around 30% of land on Earth are used for pastures and feed crops, which results in modifications of biodiversity habitats. In addition, livestock production has indirect impacts on biodiversity through its contribution to climate change and pollution (e.g. nutrients, ecotoxic substances). However, an important specificity of the livestock sector is that its impacts on biodiversity can also be positive. The LEAP biodiversity principles document contains ten case studies. They show concrete examples of biodiversity assessment in the context of livestock and illustrate how the principles can be applied. They cover a wide range of livestock systems, geographical areas and assessment methods.
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