Reducing GHG intensity through community pasture management (areas of intervention in yellow circles)

Reducing GHG intensity through community pasture management (description) Climate change mitigation through pasture-livestock systems in Europe and Central Asia Region. Pasture-livestock systems are found throughout the world, producing food from land that is too wet or too dry, too hot or too cold, too steep or too stony to support other kinds of cropping. They cover a large share of the earth’s land surface, produce significant part of the world’s milk and meat production, and boost the livelihoods of millions of households, including some of the world’s poorest. The pastures are semi-natural ecosystems, with high biodiversity, low external inputs and huge quantities of carbon stored in soil organic matter and plant roots, estimated globally at W Gt. However, many pastures suffer from poor management, often exacerbated by inappropriate policies and complex communal ownership, with some areas over-grazed and others neglected, leading to soil erosion, loss of productivity and considerable release of stored carbon. In terms of CO 2 emissions, an established pasture-livestock system is a small net absorber, with around 90 % of carbon fixed by the plants returned to the atmosphere as CO 2 through animal respiration and microbial breakdown. However, the cattle, sheep and goats that graze these pastures are all ruminants, which convert part of their dietary carbon into methane gas as well as producing dung and urine whose breakdown releases a certain amount of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. It is these two gasses, with respectively 25 times and 298 times the global-warming potential of carbon dioxide, that make pasture-livestock systems significant net greenhouse-gas emitters and contributors to global warming. A particular weakness of extensive pasture-livestock systems is that animal productivity is low, with most the animal’s diet used just to keep it alive and walking in search of the next mouthful of grass, and less than 20 % stored as meat and milk. Hence net greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product are high. A significant step to improving this situation has been taken by the World Bank CARMAC project in Armenia, where large-scale pilots over large number of demonstration plots and communities have shown that pasture users’ associations can effectively implement pasture management plans, resulting in restoration of degraded pastures, increased pasture productivity and higher meat and milk output. Whilst the long-term impact includes a net increase of greenhouse gas emissions per hectare, the increases in meat and milk output are higher, thus reducing unit emissions and making the country less dependent on grain-fed livestock products, with their high environmental footprint from fuel, fertiliser and pesticide use as well as carbon loss from arable soils. At the global level, increasing the efficiency and productivity of pasture-livestock systems will reduce pressure for deforestation to produce feed grains and oilseeds. The first stage of the project has focussed most strongly on pasture productivity, with some supporting measures in animal health and breeding, but has already led to significant increases in animal productivity. The next stage will focus on helping farmers to maximise the benefits from more productive pastures, through three main measures: (a) improved forage conservation to increase digestibility, raise feed intake and let livestock satisfy a higher proportion of their nutritional requirements from forage; (b) better ration formulation to match diet quantity and quality to the animal’s changing needs throughout the reproductive cycle, thereby raising milk yields and daily liveweight gain and so increasing overall feed conversion efficiency; and (c) strategic use of supplementary feeds when even the best forage is insufficient to support the animal’s potential, in particular to raise peak milk yields and set the animal up for high productivity through the rest of the lactation. Project actions to introduce these management changes will include: (a)testing and demonstrating alternative forage conservation practices in selected communities throughout the project; (b) developing standard ration recommendations for different classes of livestock and stage lactation, adapted to the main kinds of feeds available to farmers; (c) analysing forage samples to adapt recommendations to actual conditions in different years and locations, where variability is sufficient to warrant it; (d) keeping detailed physical and financial records of pasture and livestock production on the demonstration sites, including calculation of financial requirements and margins; and (e) disseminating the results through field days, publications, audio-visual materials and mass media. In addition, the project will continue to support improved pasture management, including scaling-up recent work on restoration of seriously degraded pastures. Environmental monitoring systems employed so far (including measurements of vegetation cover, species composition and above- and below-ground biomass) will be continued and supplemented by livestock measurements and modelling to estimate overall and specific greenhouse gas emissions across the whole pasture-livestock system and through the entire food chain. One key analytical result will be a comparison of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of meat and milk from the improved systems against (a) unimproved traditional pasture-livestock systems and (b) grain-based livestock production.Outputs from the project will include the knowledge gained and means to disseminate it within countries of the Europe and Central Asia Region where World bank has livestock projects under preparation and/or implementation; the increased income generated by project participants; improvements in the pastoral environment; a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions as livestock products produced from project systems substitute for alternative and more polluting sources of meat and milk. Later upscaling will multiply these benefits. The resources required to implement this project and disseminate its results widely will be: (a) international and local technical assistance to implement the project, manage demonstration activities, support pilot farmers, and to analyse and disseminate the results; (b) specialist services for monitoring and sample analysis; (c) purchase of capital equipment and consumables for forage production, analysis and feeding; (d) provision of modest quantities of supplementary feed and other inputs to pilot farmers; and (e) printing, publication and media dissemination.