Livestock and climate change

Livestock generates more greenhouse gases than transportation according to a 2006 report from the United Nations (U.N.).

“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” said Henning Steinfeld, a senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official and lead author of the report. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

The report, titled "Livestock’s Long Shadow–Environmental Issues and Options", notes that cattle-rearing is also a major source of land and water degradation.

"Livestock’s Long Shadow" estimates that livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of carbon dioxide, 65 percent of nitrous oxide, and 37 percent of methane produced from human-related activities. Both methane (23 times) and nitrous oxide (296 times) are considerably more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. Livestock also generates 64 percent of human-related ammonia, which contributes to acid rain.


The report estimates that livestock currently use 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface and that even more land is used to produce feed for livestock. It notes that forest clearing for livestock pasture is a "major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing."

About 20 per cent of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops."

http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1130-un.html