Greenhouse gas emissions from the EU livestock sector: A life cycle assessment carried out with the CAPRI model

By Franz Weiss, Adrian Leip. 2012

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study presents detailed product-based net emissions of main livestock products (meat, milk and eggs) at national level for the whole EU-27 according to a cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessment, including emissions from land use and land use change (LULUC). Calculations were done with the CAPRI model and the covered gases are CH4, N2O and CO2. Total GHG fluxes of European livestock production amount to 623–852 Mt CO2-equiv., 182–238 Mt CO2-equiv. (28–29%) are from beef production, 184–240 Mt CO2-equiv. (28–30%) from cow milk production and 153–226 Mt CO2-equiv. (25–27%) from pork production. According to IPCC classifications, 38–52% of total net emissions are created in the agricultural sector, 17–24% in the energy and industrial sectors. 12–16% Mt CO2-equiv. are related to land use (CO2 fluxes from cultivation of organic soils and reduced carbon sequestration compared to natural grassland) and 9–33% to land use change, mainly due to feed imports. The results suggest that for effective reduction of GHG emissions from livestock production, fluxes occurring outside the agricultural sector need to be taken into account. Reduction targets should address both the production side as defined by IPCC sectors and the consumption side. An LCA assessment as presented here could be a basis for such efforts.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfafa48a9a0caa23424a87daa2cb7330c9041230

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In Ecology

1. Tamás Krisztin
2. Petr Havlík
3. Hugo Valin
4. V. Sandström
5. Thomas Kastner
6. Mario Herrero

In Environmental Engineering

1. Mario Herrero
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Citations in the corpus

• Food and feed trade as a driver in the global nitrogen cycle: 50-year trends (2014, background): “…emission, water and land grabbing, loss of biodiversity and deforestation (Klink and Machado 2005; Galloway et al. 2007; Burke et al. 2009; McAlpine et al. 2009; DeFries et al. 2010; Schipanski and Bennett 2012; Weiss and Leip 2012; Sutton et al. 2011; Bellarby et al. 2013; Houlton et al. 2013).”
• Impacts of European livestock production: nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus and greenhouse gas emissions, land-use, water eutrophication and biodiversity (2015, methodology): “The method developed in the CAPRI model (Leip et al 2010,Weiss and Leip 2012)was based on the assumptions that the agricultural market is very fluid and no differentiation between direct and indirect LUC is possible.”
• A research challenge vision regarding management of agricultural waste in a circular bio-based economy (2018, background): “20–30% of which are methane) in EU-27 (Bellarby et al., 2013; Weiss and Leip, 2012).”
• The role of trade in the greenhouse gas footprints of EU diets (2018, background): “In the indirect approach, land use change (LUC) emissions are allocated to various products based on their relative share of total agricultural land expansion, which helps in assessing the underlying causes of deforestation (Cuypers et al., 2013; Weiss and Leip, 2012).”