Rethinking livestock futures: Integrating climate impacts and genomic technologies into global food security models

Masoud Ghaderi Zefreh, Marcos E. Dominguez Viera, Saeed E. Moghayer, Zuzana E. Smeets Kristkova, Willem-Jan van Zeist , Nils Bunnefeld, Ricardo Pong-Wong, Markus Dettenhofer, Ioannis Manikas, Andrea Doeschl-Wilson

With the projected increase in the global population and food demand on a planet in climate crisis, the debate about the role of livestock continues to intensify. Animals farmed for food are both a victim and a contributor of climate change (CC), with animals suffering from heat stress due to CC but also a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Livestock studies have demonstrated that novel breeding technologies could partly mitigate these negative effects, yet their wider implications on food security and the socio-economy are not well investigated yet. In this proof-of-concept study we incorporate, 1) the effects of heat stress on livestock’s productivity and feed efficiency, and 2) the use of genomic selection as a recently established novel breeding technology, into a global macroeconomic projection model (GMPM) to evaluate their broader impacts on food security. We find that both effects can drastically alter the model projections. In particular, the results suggest that novel breeding technologies can substantially mitigate adverse effects of CC on production, food availability, land use, and GHG, whilst also causing implications for the labour market. The study demonstrates the importance of integrating advances in livestock science and technology into GMPMs for better projections that inform livestock management, policy and consumer decision-making, requiring closer collaboration between livestock scientists and systems modellers.