TITLE:
Livestock Demand, Global Land Use Changes, and Induced Greenhouse Gas Emissions
AUTHORS:
Sunil P. Dhoubhadel, Farzad Taheripour, Matthew C. Stockton
KEYWORDS:
Livestock Demand, Land Use, GHG Emissions, CGE Model
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Environmental Protection,
Vol.7 No.7,
June
6,
2016
ABSTRACT: With increasing global population and income, the
demand for livestock products continues to grow and is likely to grow in future
as well. This raises concerns about the implications of such growth for the
environment. A well-known Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE), GTAP-
BIO, is used to project the growth of livestock output between 2004 and 2022
and to estimate the land use changes and associated Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
emissions. Results indicate that the increased livestock output leads to
considerable increase in pasture (about 45 million hectares) and decrease in
forest area (about 44 million hectares) between 2004 and 2022. Estimated
emissions associated with this change are about 20 billion tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent (CO2 e) during 2004-2022 or an annual average of 1.1 billion
tons. Results also indicate that a significant portion of the emissions (about
11%) can be reduced if consumer preferences could be altered. In practice, this
will require policy interventions that promote substitution of non-ruminant for
ruminant meat products.