Review: Livestock and Climate Change
Today I want to discuss a particular paper titled Livestock and Climate Change published by World Watch Institute in 2009. The two authors are Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang. Robert Goodland was the lead environmental advisor at the World Bank Group where he served for 23 years. Similarly, Jeff Anhang is an acting research specialist at the World Bank Group. This paper is widely cited and I decided to take a look at it myself. If you’re interested I definitely recommend doing the same!
The big claim that these authors put forward is that “livestock and their byproducts” account for 51% of annual worldwide GHG (green-house-gas) emissions. This is a shocking statistic, and the reasoning behind it is solid.
Before I get into it, I quickly want to address my bias. I know in my heart that animal agriculture is unethical, but if animal agriculture did not make a large contribution to climate change, I would not pretend otherwise.
That said, I hope you remain skeptical and use your own reasoning to think about the arguments in this paper. I will go over the most important information presented and my own thoughts about it, but ultimately it’s of course up to your judgement. I believe we live in a time period when we cannot trust the established authorities to protect and provide for us, so it is especially important for everyone to use their own common sense.
Now lets dig in!
The authors begin by referencing another widely cited article, Livestock’s Long Shadow, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In this 2006 article they conclude that:
The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent.
To put this in perspective, the transportation sector counts for less. Obviously, this number alone is a major crisis.
However, Goodland and Anhang state that the direct and indirect sources of GHG emissions from livestock in this previous analysis are underestimated, overlooked, or assigned to the wrong sector. Furthermore, they state:
Data on livestock vary from place to place and are affected by unavoidable imprecision; where it was impossible to avoid imprecision in estimating any sum of GHGs, we strove to minimize the sum so our overall estimate could be understood as conservative.
For 51% to be a conservative estimate is quite surprising.
So, let’s take a closer look at these direct and indirect sources of GHG emissions from livestock that Goodland and Anhang (G&A from now on) claim were not accounted for in the 2006 FAO analysis. There are five main sources of GHGs that G&A discuss, and I will briefly cover them all.
First, G&A point out that the FAO excluded livestock respiration from their estimate because they see livestock as a part of a historically unchanged biological system. On the contrary, G&A argue that it is inaccurate to exclude livestock respiration because:
…livestock (like automobiles) are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of CO2 exhaled by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.
This looks like a case of inaccurate assumptions by FAO. Livestock today obviously account for much more respiration than they ever would have without domestication. Livestock respiration adds an addition 13.7% to the total GHG emissions of livestock.
Second, G&A disagree with how the FAO counted land use in their analysis. It’s worth quoting them at length here:
The FAO counts emissions attributable to changes in land use due to the introduction of livestock, but only the relatively small amount of GHGs from changes each year. Strangely, it does not count the much larger amount of annual GHG reductions from photosynthesis that are foregone by using 26 percent of land worldwide for grazing livestock and 33 percent of arable land for growing feed, rather than allowing it to regenerate forest. By itself, leaving a significant amount of tropical land used for grazing livestock and growing feed to regenerate as forest could potentially mitigate as much as half (or even more) of all anthropogenic GHGs. A key reason why this is not happening is that reclaiming land used for grazing livestock and growing feed is not yet a priority; on the contrary, feed production and grazing have been fast expanding into forest.
What they are saying here is that the FAO did not consider the opportunity cost of not using forested land for grazing. This omission adds (conservatively) 4.2% to the total.
Third, G&A talk about the importance of methane. They say:
According to the FAO, 37 percent of human induced methane comes from livestock. Although methane warms the atmosphere much more strongly than does CO2, its half-life in the atmosphere is only about 8 years, versus at least 100 years for CO2. As a result, a significant reduction in livestock raised worldwide would reduce GHGs relatively quickly compared with measures involving renewable energy and energy efficiency.
This isn’t something that I have head of before, however it makes a lot of sense to me to prioritize a GHG that shows ‘quick’ results. That said, the FAO used an outdated method for comparing the effects of methane to the effects of CO2. This outdated method caused them to under count the effects of methane from livestock by 7.9 percent.
Fourth, G&A argue that an additional 8.7% of emissions from livestock are due to errors in the analysis by FAO. These errors are:
Using 2002 numbers to calculate the GHG emissions of livestock products. However, between 2002 and 2009, livestock products increased by 12%. GHG emissions from livestock products proportionally increased in that time period.
The total number of livestock was under estimated. Again I will quote at length:
“Livestock’s Long Shadow reports that 33.0 million tons of poultry were produced worldwide in 2002, while FAO’s Food Outlook of April 2003 reports that 72.9 million tons of poultry were produced worldwide in 2002. The report also states that 21.7 billion head of livestock were raised worldwide in 2002, while many nongovernmental organizations report that about 50 billion head of livestock were raised each year in the early 2000s. If the true number is closer to 50 billion than to 21.7 billion, then the percentage of GHGs worldwide attributable to undercounting in official livestock statistics would likely be over 10 percent.”
The FAO analysis uses statistics on livestock GHG emissions from the years 1964, 1982, 1993, 1999, and 2001, when emissions today would be much higher.
The FAO generalizes statistics from Minnesota, where livestock operations are relatively efficient compared to those in most developing countries. The livestock sector is growing fastest in developing countries and numbers from Minnesota do not reflect the reality in these countries.
That’s a lot to take in, but clearly the FAO was not practicing good science here. These are mistakes that didn’t need to be made, or could have been accounted for.
Fifth and finally, G&A point out that the FAO excluded livestock driven deforestation from Argentina, they omit farmed fish from their definition of livestock, and they omit emissions from construction and operation of marine and land-based industries raising marine organisms as additives in livestock feed. These omissions add an additional 4.7% to the total.
When we add up these five areas of uncounted emissions, we can see that the grand total for annual GHG emissions attributable to livestock is 51%. The chart below is useful to consider.
This chart is taken from page 11, World Watch Journal, Livestock and Climate Change, Goodland and Anhang, 2009.
However, G&A provide a list of other sources of GHGs completely unaccounted for by the FAO article. I have copied the list here:
Fluorocarbons (needed for cooling livestock products much more than alternatives),which have a global warming potential up to several thousand times higher than that of CO2.
Cooking, which typically entails higher temperatures and longer periods for meat than alternatives, and in developing countries entails large amounts of charcoal (which reduces carbon absorption by consuming trees) and kerosene, each of which emits high levels of GHGs.
Disposal of inevitably large amounts of liquid waste from livestock, and waste livestock products in the form of bone, fat, and spoiled products, all of which emit high amounts of GHGs when disposed in landfills, incinerators, and waterways.
Production, distribution, and disposal of byproducts, such as leather, feathers, skin, and fur, and their packaging.
Production, distribution, and disposal of packaging used for livestock products, which for sanitary reasons is much more extensive than for alternatives to livestock products.
Carbon-intensive medical treatment of millions of cases worldwide of zoonotic illnesses (such as swine flu) and chronic degenerative illnesses (such as coronary heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and hypertension leading to strokes) linked to the consumption of livestock products. Full accounting of GHGs attributable to livestock products would cover portions of the construction and operation of pharmaceutical and medical industries used to treat these illnesses.
These are areas that I assumed would be counted in any number claiming to represent a total of GHG emissions from livestock. It disturbs me that the FAO left these out of their calculations entirely. How could they leave out fluorocarbons when they are up to thousands of times more damaging than CO2? How could they leave out liquid waste, byproducts, packaging, and cooking? Aren’t these obvious sources of GHGs? Perhaps there’s a reasonable explanation, but these are serious concerns that must be addressed.
G&A go on to discuss how a plant-based diet could be implemented by companies to mitigate climate change, but I will stop my commentary here.
Thanks for reading guys! If anything, this means consumers have more power to create change by eating a plant-based diet, and that’s a great thing.
xo
