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Geoff's Guest Appearance
Professor Geoff Simm (opens in new window)
Professor Geoff Simm, SAC’s Academic Director and Vice Principal, Research, would like to see more animal scientists engaged in the increasingly important area of livestock production and climate change.
Writing a guest editorial in the journal Animal, published by Cambridge Journals, Geoff Simm explains that livestock production is responsible for 40% of global agricultural gross domestic product and is central to the livelihood of some of the world’s poorest people. While it is a contributor to global environmental problems it can also be part of the solution.
According to Geoff Simm, livestock production occupies 70% of all agricultural land, and 30% of the ice-free land surface of the planet. Ruminants have the ability to convert grass and other plant material that is unsuitable for humans into high-quality food, especially on land unsuitable for other cropping. Global demand for livestock products is expected to double during the first half of this century, as a result of the growing human population, and its growing affluence.
Describing the challenges created by climate change, the expansion of crop production for biofuels and the impact on food production, supply and cost, Geoff Simm says food security remains one of the highest priority issues in developing countries. In arguing that livestock production has a key role in many of them he accepts these interconnected issues are creating immense pressure on the planet’s resources. Geoff Simm believes we need high quality animal science to help meet rising demand for food in an environmentally and socially responsible way.
Simm’s article introduces a series of papers from a conference on Livestock and Global Climate Change held in Tunisia during 2008. It was organised by the British Society of Animal Science, INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique), the European Association for Animal Production, ICARDA (International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas) with many other partners and sponsors.
It concluded that substantial investment in animal science was needed to develop livestock systems that minimised greenhouse gas emissions and were adapted to global climate change, but contributed to growing global food needs. It stressed the importance of proper data on emission measurement as opposed to reliance on predictions. Delegates also felt that if these issues were to be considered in the wider global context of cost and access to food, environmental impacts, food v. fuel and international development then more joint working was required between livestock, plant and soil scientists, economists and sociologists.
Among the papers arising from that meeting in Tunisia, he highlights a review of the role livestock can play in mitigating climate change (Gill et al. (2010)), a paper exploring the evidence on carbon sequestration by grasslands and the practices that maximise this important benefit (Soussana et al. (2010)) and the paper by Dr Eileen Wall of SAC that examines how genetic selection of livestock can contribute to reducing emissions at the animal or system level.