D6.1 Report on the level of circularity for European territories

Summary

Livestock is seen as a major contributor to environmental challenges, particularly regarding greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss. Indeed, globally, livestock contributes to 18% of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions (Gerber, 2013). Also, livestock is responsible for 70 % of land use globally (FAO, 2009). These impacts are commonly assessed using well-established methodologies such as environmental footprint analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) (de Vries and de Boer, 2010). These methods measure ecoefficiency: they quantify the resource inputs, such as land, water, and feed inputs, required to produce a unit of animal-sourced product. As a result, animal-sourced products from livestock husbandry systems that deliver the highest output of animal-sourced food with the lowest resource input are typically considered the most sustainable (van der Werf et al., 2020). However, these methods may fail to consider whether the resources used are renewable or if their production stays within planetary boundaries. Moreover, by design, these methods inherently assess livestock as a net source of environmental pressure. This reductionist approach often fails to account for the potential benefits, including ecosystem services that well-managed livestock systems can provide, such as nutrient cycling, biodiversity support, carbon sequestration, or cultural and recreational landscape values. Additionally, these methods are frequently applied at the farm or value chain level, which is typically an inappropriate scale for assessing ecosystem services (Yu et al., 2021). Ecosystem services arise from the interaction between natural ecosystems and humans needs, making them spatially explicit and requiring assessment within their specific context (Andersson et al., 2015). As a result, life cycle assessments often overlook the complexity and variability of livestock-environment interactions, where the environmental outcomes of livestock systems are highly dependent on management practices, stocking densities, and the specific ecological context in which they operate (Houzer and Scoones, 2021).