Food security and climate change are the most important global challenges of the 21. century. Milk, meat, fish and eggs represent an important part of a healthy and well-balanced human diet, because of the nutritional value of protein of animal origin. The worldwide rising population and the increasing wealth in the emerging nations and changing consumer behaviour will cause a duplication of the demand for food of farm animal origin until the year 2050.
Beside the supply of high quality food for human nutrition, animal production has a high impact on safeguarding the future rural areas in Germany. About 1.5 million employees are working in this field and therefore it provides a significant and reliable employment in Germany. Furthermore, animal production guarantees the conservation and care of the cultural landscape and contributes to the attractiveness and recreational value of rural areas.
The forecasted climate change will have an important impact on animal production. In Central Europe, regionally increased temperatures, precipitation changes and extreme weather events will not only cause heat stress induced lower productivity in farm animals, but also changing feed structure and capacity as well as alterations in infection dynamics and regional distribution of diseases.
Besides these direct influences of the climate change, farm animal husbandry will be influenced indirectly by changes in resources, supply and demand for food or of bio-energy. For example, lower output in crop production, lower feed value of crops will result in higher production costs in that future harvests will have an impact on land prices and leasing rates.
The global changes in energy prices, harvest yield and the increasing demand for food in other continents will further have an impact on the German market.
At the same time, animal production contributes to the emissions of the main greenhouse gases such as methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O). The calculated direct emissions of these three greenhouse gases (GHG) from agriculture accounts to 134.6 million t CO2-äquivalents (CO2Äq) in 2008 and therefore has a share of 13.9% of all greenhouse gas emissions in Germany. Therefore, in Germany agriculture including animal production has a rather limited GHG mitigation potential.
Arable land use, the production and application of fertilizer as well as the digestive system of farm animals are the main GHG sources in agriculture. The type and level of production system and its efficiency significantly affect greenhouse gas emissions. N2O-emissions are mainly caused through the type and intensity of feed production, whereas CH4-emissions are almost exclusively caused by volatile gases from the digestion of ruminants. CO2-emissions are caused through both operational emissions along the whole production process and land use, in particular changes in land use such as retrogression from grassland to arable land or forest clearance.
Emissions from the digestion of ruminants (19.5 Mill. t CO2Äq/a), the management of the mineral fertilizer (8.0 Mill. t CO2Äq/a), land use and changes in land use (85 Mill. t CO2Äq/a), respectively, mainly contribute to the overall GHG-emissions from agriculture in Germany.
The aim of this policy document is to highlight climate relevant aspects of the animal production systems, to identify possible emission mitigation potentials and to put them into the context of a systemic view on sustainability. Furthermore, potential consequences of the climate change on European animal production systems and adaption strategies for animal breeding and husbandry are discussed on the basis of a holistic systemic view.
