An industry-commissioned analysis has shown that Northern Ireland will have to lose over 1 million sheep and cattle to enable it to meet its new legally binding climate emissions targets.
According to the analysis, the large-scale reduction in farm animals comes after the passing of the jurisdiction’s first-ever climate act, which requires the farming sector to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and reduce methane emissions by almost 50% over the same period.
The analysis by KPMG, a British-Dutch Multinational professional services network which was commissioned by industry representatives including the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU), showed that about a third of human-caused methane emissions come from livestock, mostly from the burps and manure of beef and dairy cattle.
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The analysis estimates that more than 500,000 cattle and about 700,000 sheep would need to be lost for Northern Ireland to meet the new climate targets.
This is even as a separate analysis by the UK government’s climate advisers has suggested that chicken numbers would also need to be cut by 5 million by 2035 and that both the pig and poultry sectors in Northern Ireland have seen rapid growth in the past decade.
For some years now, Northern Ireland has been the only devolved administration which does not have dedicated climate legislation and targets for emissions reduction.
According to reports, the region’s agri-food industry and associated farming groups have long raised concerns about the expected impact of emissions reductions.
While agriculture accounts for about 27% of Northern Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, with the vast majority coming from livestock, Its heavily export-driven meat industry principally supplies Great Britain.
Responding, a spokesperson for KPMG said, “under the [Climate Change Act’s] net-zero target, we have assumed that ‘beef and other cattle’, ‘dairy’ and ‘sheep’ do the most work to decarbonise due to these sectors accounting for the largest livestock-related impact on NI’s carbon emissions.
The spokesperson said that both the ‘pig’ and ‘poultry’ sectors have a minor impact on agriculture carbon emissions (2% and 1%, respectively) and, therefore, any effort to decarbonise can be assumed to have a minor impact on total carbon emissions.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
