Project Summary

The overall objective of Re-Livestock is to evaluate and mobilize the adoption of innovative practices applied cross-scale (animal, herd, farm, sector and region) to reduce GHG emissions from livestock farming systems and increase their capacity to deal with potential climate change impacts. To reach our aim, Re-Livestock have brought together scientific expertise in Europe and Australia and across disciplines, including co-innovation, animal feeding, breeding, welfare, farm management, environmental and socioeconomic assessment and policy analysis, to develop novel and scientifically supported integrated approaches specific for different dairy, beef and pig systems and geographic regions in the context of climate change. Strong collaboration with industry stakeholders to identify the innovations and to co-design the validation will ensure relevance and maximize the adoption of best practices. National groups of farmers (case studies) and ‘stakeholder forums’ together with a ‘European multi-actor platform’ will allow for an engaged co-design of transition pathways whilst ‘learning from innovation networks’ will allow for the testing and sharing of latest innovative solutions. A ‘community of practice’ will extend the multi-actor approach to a broad range of stakeholders.

Re-Livestock is a 37-partner consortium whose main objectives are to improve the sustainability of feeding resources for livestock across European regions, to accelerate the development and application of new breeding tools and strategies to achieve permanent and timely reductions in GHG emissions and adaptation to climate change, to evaluate system specific farm-level husbandry practices to reduce net GHG emissions and increase adaptation to different scenarios, to refine and apply innovative holistic farm-scale environmental and socioeconomic assessment tools to enhance the adoption of the practices, to enable the resilience of livestock production systems today and in the future under different climatic scenarios from regional to global scale by adopting innovations based on circularity principles, to design action-based pathways for the transition towards resilient livestock farming systems and to understand the factors influencing the adoption and efficacy of mitigation and adaptation practices with multi-actor engagement.