Co-creating climate innovations for resilient and low-emissions livestock systems
Challenges
Farmers and livestock keepers across Africa and Asia face mounting climate change impacts. Changing weather patterns and climate shocks threaten the incomes, livelihoods, health, and nutrition of millions.
More frequent droughts and floods challenge farmers’ access to animal feed and water. Rising temperatures and heat stress increase animal mortality, decrease productivity, and result in changing disease patterns. Overgrazed and degraded landscapes have lost their capacity to support productive livestock herds, leading to competition and conflict over resources. Compounding climate change impacts also increase vulnerability, marginalization, and inequality in livestock-rearing communities. At the same time, livestock systems contribute to climate change by generating greenhouse gasses such as methane.
Countries with large livestock populations are committed to sustainably managing rangelands and farming landscapes as well as to decreasing their environmental and carbon footprints. This means finding low-emissions approaches to livestock production while boosting productivity to decrease net emissions per liter of milk or kilogram of meat produced. Innovations that both increase productivity and reduce emissions are essential to meet global goals on nutrition, livelihoods, and climate.
Goal
To collaborate with partners to build capacity, establish an enabling environment, and develop and deploy innovations that enable livestock-rearing communities to boost their productivity and resilience while lowering emissions, optimizing the co-benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation.
Objectives
- To develop risk management approaches that build resilience for smallholder farmers and livestock keepers in marginalized farming and pastoral communities.
- To build tools and approaches for restoring and sustainably managing rangelands and sustaining pastoral livelihoods.
- To maximize co-benefits of climate adaptation and mitigation through circular, intensified, and diversified low-emissions crop–livestock systems.
- To build and apply digital innovations in agriculture and livestock systems.
