Biodiversity and the livestock sector

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.