Livestock, Respiration and Climate | Worldwatch
Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, formerly and currently with the World Bank Group, co-author "Livestock and Climate Change" in the November/December issue of WorldWatch Magazine, and provide online links to sources and resources.
Livestock are already well-known to contribute to GHG emissions. Livestock’s Long Shadow, the widely-cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), estimates that 7,516 million metric tons per year of CO2 equivalents (CO2e), or 18 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions, are attributable to cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, camels, horses, pigs, and poultry. That amount would easily qualify livestock for a hard look indeed in the search for ways to address climate change. But our analysis shows that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32,564million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions.
Their accounting finds overlooked land use (4.2% of total global CO2e), undercounted methane (7.9%) - and, most significantly, livestock respiration, discounted by the FAO and totaling 13.7% of global CO2e. Is that possible?
Goodland and Anhang:
[L]ivestock (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. Moreover, while over time an equilibrium of CO2 may exist between the amount respired by animals and the amount photosynthesized by plants, that equilibrium has never been static. Today, tens of billions more livestock are exhaling CO2 than in preindustrial days, while Earth’s photosynthetic capacity (its capacity to keep carbon out of the atmosphere by absorbing it in plant mass) has declined sharply as forest has been cleared. ...
The FAO asserts that livestock respiration is not listed as a recognized source of GHGs under the Kyoto Protocol, although in fact the Protocol does list CO2 with no exception, and “other” is included as a catchall category. For clarity, it should be listed separately in whatever protocol replaces Kyoto.
It is tempting to exclude one or another anthropogenic source of emissions from carbon accounting — according to one’s own interests — on the grounds that it is offset by photosynthesis. But if it is legitimate to count as GHG sources fossil-fuel-driven automobiles, which hundreds of millions of people do not drive, then it is equally legitimate to count livestock respiration. Little or no livestock product is consumed by hundreds of millions of humans, and no livestock respiration (unlike human respiration) is needed for human survival. By keeping GHGs attributable to livestock respiration off GHG balance sheets, it is predictable that they will not be managed and their amount will increase — as in fact is happening.
