Integrating animal welfare as part of sustainability assessments

Summary

In the pursuit of more climate friendly animal production, more intensive production systems are often favoured. This creates a risk of trade-offs e.g. between reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting good animal welfare (AW). However, there are also opportunities for synergies and systems with high degree of both animal welfare and sustainability. Nevertheless, to identify these potential trade-offs and synergies, proper tools for assessing these multiple aspects of sustainability are needed. Several standard procedures already exist for assessing environmental impacts, e.g., life cycle assessments (LCA), but similar tools for AW assessment are not yet developed. We have reviewed the literature to evaluate methods used so far for integrating AW into sustainability assessments. To allow for comparison of AW impact across species and production systems, it is necessary to relate the AW score to a functional unit. However, papers doing so report that the AW score is much more sensitive to the number of animals required to produce a functional unit, than on AW-promoting initiatives. This could be caused by most papers mainly including indicators of only negative AW; even a small reduction in AW will be magnified if many animals are needed to produce a functional unit in one system compared to another. This effect of number of animals may be reduced, if also indicators of positive AW are included in the assessment. The objective of our presentation is to discuss the further development of AW assessment tools in connection to sustainability assessments.