“The Paris agreement offers new challenges for the livestock sector, in that it introduces more ambitious longer term emissions-reduction targets,” said Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow with Chatham House, a London think tank.
“Given the importance of livestock to global emissions, this increases the imperative for reductions from the sector.”
Countries agreed “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century.” That scope reaches beyond the three sectors climate advocates have focused on so far—energy, industry, and transportation.
Countries will have difficulty achieving net-zero emissions unless they address emissions from livestock, variously estimated at 14.5 percent, 18 percent, or even as high as 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
“The kind of secret source of greenhouse emissions that no politicians are talking about at the moment are the emissions that come from the livestock industry,” said Peter Singer, a Princeton moral philosopher who has studied climate change as “humanity’s greatest ethical challenge,” in a Chicago appearance ahead of COP 21.
“The United Nation’s food and agriculture organization said a few years ago, in a document called Livestock’s Long Shadow, that the livestock industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transport sector. So more than all of the cars, planes, trains, ships and so on. So after stationary power generation, that may well be the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, in particular of methane emissions which come from ruminant animals.”
Source: Forbes