Contributing authors: Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane, Clean Air Task Force; Greg Kohler, Agriculture Expert, Climate and Clean Air Coalition; Jennifer Chow, Senior Director, Climate-Resilient Food Systems, Environmental Defense Fund; Pamela Ruiter, Director, Global Agricultural Methane, Environmental Defense Fund; Derek Tepe, Project Manager, Global Agriculture Methane, Environmental Defense Fund
The Path to Lower Livestock Emissions
Livestock systems sit at the heart of both an opportunity and a challenge: they provide food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions worldwide while also being the single largest source of human-driven methane emissions. Cutting these emissions is one of the fastest, most impactful levers we have to slow near-term warming.
At New York Climate Week (September 2025), Spark Climate Solutions, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Clean Air Task Force (CATF) convened experts, innovators, policymakers, and funders to explore how nutrition, genetics, and animal health paired alongside breakthrough innovations, can be aligned to drive meaningful and scalable emissions reductions. The conversation centered on how to strengthen the systems and incentives that make lower-emission livestock systems not only possible but profitable and scalable.
Livestock production is responsible for up to 32% of human-caused methane emissions. Meeting the dual challenges of feeding a growing population and reducing emissions requires a holistic systems approach grounded in sustainable productivity gains built on three pillars: improving animal nutrition, advancing genetics, and strengthening animal health—while enabling the adoption of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies. This challenge is global but highly context-dependent. Livestock systems vary by geography, scale, and culture, requiring solutions that are locally adapted and still globally scalable.
Optimization of productivity gains has historically delivered climate benefits: modern dairy cows now produce twice as much milk as 50 years ago, with 60% of that improvement attributable to genetics. Sustaining and expanding these gains will require regionally tailored support for farmers to adopt practices and technologies that are viable in practice, not just in theory.
Throughout the discussion, participants resonated with a core message: more productive animals produce more food and, therefore, emit less methane per unit of food. Although productivity targets must reflect regional and contextual realities, several pillars consistently underpin sustainable gains: adequate nutrition, steady genetic improvement, and strong animal health.
Healthy animals have lower mortality, therefore avoiding “wasted emissions”, and spend less energy fighting disease, redirecting that energy toward producing more milk or gaining more weight. Adequate nutrition and better pasture management lead to healthier animals, improving feed conversion, i.e. more milk and meat per unit of feed, and thereby lower emissions.
Selecting for animals with desired traits, such as better production, fertility, longevity, and heat stress resistance, ensures these powerful genes are additively built upon in future generations, creating herds that are more robust, productive, and resilient.
Over time, more productive systems require fewer animals to produce the same amount of food, a trend already visible in many countries that have invested in sustainable herd productivity. These gains bring multiple benefits: higher incomes, lower emissions per unit of food produced, and reduced pressure on land and ecosystems. This can be particularly impactful in livestock grazing systems, which represent the majority of cattle globally.
Importantly, productivity improvements often accompany technology adoption: farmers who increase their productivity are more likely to adopt novel methane-reducing innovations. Moreover, in regions where climate discussions remain sensitive or methane is not a top priority, a productivity-focused narrative can serve as an effective entry point for broader engagement.
Call for action: Achieving climate goals depends on faster global livestock productivity growth. Productivity, including in pasture-based systems, needs to rise 25% faster than historical rates to meet 2050 demand, representing 67% growth in beef, 58% in dairy, and 76% in sheep and goat production compared to 2010.
Achieving this will require coordinated, collaborative action: policy alignment, repurposed subsidies, focused investment in nutrition, animal health, and breeding, and robust technology transfer and extension mechanisms to ensure adoption at scale.
In addition to productivity gains, methane-reducing technologies must be adopted at scale. These include vaccines, feed additives, improved forage varieties, and genetic selection for animals that naturally produce less methane. The discussion highlighted the potential of these technologies to deliver scalable methane reductions and transform the environmental impact of livestock systems.
New studies show that their impact can be additive—and in some cases, multiplicative. For example, combining genetic improvements with vaccines has been shown to amplify both productivity and climate benefits. Vaccine solution providers are strategically targeting markets with lower regulatory barriers to accelerate deployment globally, while U.S. genetic improvements are spreading worldwide through semen exports, extending these productivity and emissions benefits to low- and middle-income countries.
Call for action: Achieving our climate goals will require sustained investment and coordinated effort to move breakthrough methane-reducing technologies from pilots to practice. Targeted collaboration can accelerate innovation, lower adoption barriers, and enable these solutions to scale across diverse livestock systems worldwide.
Methane is not only a greenhouse gas—it also represents a 2–12% loss of gross energy intake in cattle. Farmers stand to gain economically from solutions that capture this “wasted energy” by redirecting it toward meat and milk production while also benefiting from broader productivity improvements.
However, the farm-level economics must be clear. In many cases, the upfront cost of adopting known technologies is seen as risky, and access to finance remains limited, even when the return on investment (ROI) is positive. Additionally, in the case of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies, the ROI for farmers may not yet exist, significantly limiting adoption and slowing needed innovation pathways. Our panelists and participants emphasized the importance of strong market signals to catalyze funding toward the continuous development, scaling, and deployment of these solutions. They also called for supportive policies and market-based mechanisms that enable adoption at the farm level and throughout supply chains.
Creative and innovative financial mechanisms are already making an impact. Platforms have paid millions of dollars directly to farmers, demonstrating that credible finance pathways can drive rapid adoption. As one panelist noted: “Proposals with clear data make the investment page pop.” Data-backed approaches have already unlocked hundreds of millions in investment, such as the recent $360 million Dairy Interventions for Mitigation and Adaptation initiative in East Africa.
The call for action: Innovative, locally adapted policies and financing mechanisms are essential to signal market confidence, spur continued innovation in methane-reducing technologies, and make adoption viable and profitable for farmers at scale.
Reducing methane at scale requires proper measurement. Current tools face accuracy limitations: error rates of up to 30–40% make it difficult to distinguish small but meaningful reductions, undermining both credibility and the upper value ceiling of carbon credits. Direct measurement of emissions at the animal level remains the "holy grail," and real progress is underway. Emerging technologies are moving closer to narrowing error margins, while advances in AI software are already reducing costs and integrating varied data from farm operations seamlessly. Measurement isn’t just a technical issue: it underpins finance, adoption, and policy.
The call for action: Developing and deploying cost-effective, practical, and scalable methane measurement tools is essential, including in regions where locally generated data remain limited. While farm-level models are valuable, their assumptions and inputs must be validated with precise, field-based data to ensure accuracy and credibility. Strengthening these capabilities globally will help unlock finance, verify impact, and guide evidence-based policy and investment.
Technology adoption happens one farmer at a time. Peer-to-peer influence is consistently the most effective driver: farmers listen first to other farmers. Strong advisory and extension networks, particularly those integrating digital tools and services, can catalyze access to and engagement with new technologies and practices. Understanding and mapping stakeholder incentives for integrating innovations is key to overcoming barriers. Building trust, demonstrating tangible value, and ensuring sustainable farmer livelihoods are the cornerstones of successful adoption.
“This has to be farmer-led. This has to be a public-private partnership. This has to be profitable to be repeatable.” ~ Eamon Ryan, former Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Republic of Ireland
The call for action: Building change in collaboration with farmers is essential. Outreach should highlight the challenges but also the opportunities of integrated livestock production and environmental action. Trust is the foundation for attitude and behavior change, and leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital platforms present new pathways to reach farmers, accelerate communication, and translate awareness into action.
Momentum is building, but progress depends on more than just technology development. To make meaningful methane reductions in livestock systems, we need to:
With directed and strategic support from philanthropy, finance, and policy, livestock methane reductions can become a powerful lever for climate action while advancing food security, farmer livelihoods, and animal health worldwide.
Contributing authors: Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane, Clean Air Task Force; Greg Kohler, Agriculture Expert, Climate and Clean Air Coalition; Jennifer Chow, Senior Director, Climate-Resilient Food Systems, Environmental Defense Fund; Pamela Ruiter, Director, Global Agricultural Methane, Environmental Defense Fund; Derek Tepe, Project Manager, Global Agriculture Methane, Environmental Defense Fund
The Path to Lower Livestock Emissions
Livestock systems sit at the heart of both an opportunity and a challenge: they provide food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions worldwide while also being the single largest source of human-driven methane emissions. Cutting these emissions is one of the fastest, most impactful levers we have to slow near-term warming.
At New York Climate Week (September 2025), Spark Climate Solutions, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Clean Air Task Force (CATF) convened experts, innovators, policymakers, and funders to explore how nutrition, genetics, and animal health paired alongside breakthrough innovations, can be aligned to drive meaningful and scalable emissions reductions. The conversation centered on how to strengthen the systems and incentives that make lower-emission livestock systems not only possible but profitable and scalable.
Livestock production is responsible for up to 32% of human-caused methane emissions. Meeting the dual challenges of feeding a growing population and reducing emissions requires a holistic systems approach grounded in sustainable productivity gains built on three pillars: improving animal nutrition, advancing genetics, and strengthening animal health—while enabling the adoption of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies. This challenge is global but highly context-dependent. Livestock systems vary by geography, scale, and culture, requiring solutions that are locally adapted and still globally scalable.
Optimization of productivity gains has historically delivered climate benefits: modern dairy cows now produce twice as much milk as 50 years ago, with 60% of that improvement attributable to genetics. Sustaining and expanding these gains will require regionally tailored support for farmers to adopt practices and technologies that are viable in practice, not just in theory.
Throughout the discussion, participants resonated with a core message: more productive animals produce more food and, therefore, emit less methane per unit of food. Although productivity targets must reflect regional and contextual realities, several pillars consistently underpin sustainable gains: adequate nutrition, steady genetic improvement, and strong animal health.
Healthy animals have lower mortality, therefore avoiding “wasted emissions”, and spend less energy fighting disease, redirecting that energy toward producing more milk or gaining more weight. Adequate nutrition and better pasture management lead to healthier animals, improving feed conversion, i.e. more milk and meat per unit of feed, and thereby lower emissions.
Selecting for animals with desired traits, such as better production, fertility, longevity, and heat stress resistance, ensures these powerful genes are additively built upon in future generations, creating herds that are more robust, productive, and resilient.
Over time, more productive systems require fewer animals to produce the same amount of food, a trend already visible in many countries that have invested in sustainable herd productivity. These gains bring multiple benefits: higher incomes, lower emissions per unit of food produced, and reduced pressure on land and ecosystems. This can be particularly impactful in livestock grazing systems, which represent the majority of cattle globally.
Importantly, productivity improvements often accompany technology adoption: farmers who increase their productivity are more likely to adopt novel methane-reducing innovations. Moreover, in regions where climate discussions remain sensitive or methane is not a top priority, a productivity-focused narrative can serve as an effective entry point for broader engagement.
Call for action: Achieving climate goals depends on faster global livestock productivity growth. Productivity, including in pasture-based systems, needs to rise 25% faster than historical rates to meet 2050 demand, representing 67% growth in beef, 58% in dairy, and 76% in sheep and goat production compared to 2010.
Achieving this will require coordinated, collaborative action: policy alignment, repurposed subsidies, focused investment in nutrition, animal health, and breeding, and robust technology transfer and extension mechanisms to ensure adoption at scale.
In addition to productivity gains, methane-reducing technologies must be adopted at scale. These include vaccines, feed additives, improved forage varieties, and genetic selection for animals that naturally produce less methane. The discussion highlighted the potential of these technologies to deliver scalable methane reductions and transform the environmental impact of livestock systems.
New studies show that their impact can be additive—and in some cases, multiplicative. For example, combining genetic improvements with vaccines has been shown to amplify both productivity and climate benefits. Vaccine solution providers are strategically targeting markets with lower regulatory barriers to accelerate deployment globally, while U.S. genetic improvements are spreading worldwide through semen exports, extending these productivity and emissions benefits to low- and middle-income countries.
Call for action: Achieving our climate goals will require sustained investment and coordinated effort to move breakthrough methane-reducing technologies from pilots to practice. Targeted collaboration can accelerate innovation, lower adoption barriers, and enable these solutions to scale across diverse livestock systems worldwide.
Methane is not only a greenhouse gas—it also represents a 2–12% loss of gross energy intake in cattle. Farmers stand to gain economically from solutions that capture this “wasted energy” by redirecting it toward meat and milk production while also benefiting from broader productivity improvements.
However, the farm-level economics must be clear. In many cases, the upfront cost of adopting known technologies is seen as risky, and access to finance remains limited, even when the return on investment (ROI) is positive. Additionally, in the case of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies, the ROI for farmers may not yet exist, significantly limiting adoption and slowing needed innovation pathways. Our panelists and participants emphasized the importance of strong market signals to catalyze funding toward the continuous development, scaling, and deployment of these solutions. They also called for supportive policies and market-based mechanisms that enable adoption at the farm level and throughout supply chains.
Creative and innovative financial mechanisms are already making an impact. Platforms have paid millions of dollars directly to farmers, demonstrating that credible finance pathways can drive rapid adoption. As one panelist noted: “Proposals with clear data make the investment page pop.” Data-backed approaches have already unlocked hundreds of millions in investment, such as the recent $360 million Dairy Interventions for Mitigation and Adaptation initiative in East Africa.
The call for action: Innovative, locally adapted policies and financing mechanisms are essential to signal market confidence, spur continued innovation in methane-reducing technologies, and make adoption viable and profitable for farmers at scale.
Reducing methane at scale requires proper measurement. Current tools face accuracy limitations: error rates of up to 30–40% make it difficult to distinguish small but meaningful reductions, undermining both credibility and the upper value ceiling of carbon credits. Direct measurement of emissions at the animal level remains the "holy grail," and real progress is underway. Emerging technologies are moving closer to narrowing error margins, while advances in AI software are already reducing costs and integrating varied data from farm operations seamlessly. Measurement isn’t just a technical issue: it underpins finance, adoption, and policy.
The call for action: Developing and deploying cost-effective, practical, and scalable methane measurement tools is essential, including in regions where locally generated data remain limited. While farm-level models are valuable, their assumptions and inputs must be validated with precise, field-based data to ensure accuracy and credibility. Strengthening these capabilities globally will help unlock finance, verify impact, and guide evidence-based policy and investment.
Technology adoption happens one farmer at a time. Peer-to-peer influence is consistently the most effective driver: farmers listen first to other farmers. Strong advisory and extension networks, particularly those integrating digital tools and services, can catalyze access to and engagement with new technologies and practices. Understanding and mapping stakeholder incentives for integrating innovations is key to overcoming barriers. Building trust, demonstrating tangible value, and ensuring sustainable farmer livelihoods are the cornerstones of successful adoption.
“This has to be farmer-led. This has to be a public-private partnership. This has to be profitable to be repeatable.” ~ Eamon Ryan, former Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Republic of Ireland
The call for action: Building change in collaboration with farmers is essential. Outreach should highlight the challenges but also the opportunities of integrated livestock production and environmental action. Trust is the foundation for attitude and behavior change, and leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital platforms present new pathways to reach farmers, accelerate communication, and translate awareness into action.
Momentum is building, but progress depends on more than just technology development. To make meaningful methane reductions in livestock systems, we need to:
With directed and strategic support from philanthropy, finance, and policy, livestock methane reductions can become a powerful lever for climate action while advancing food security, farmer livelihoods, and animal health worldwide.
Contributing authors: Fernanda Ferreira, Director for Agriculture Methane, Clean Air Task Force; Greg Kohler, Agriculture Expert, Climate and Clean Air Coalition; Jennifer Chow, Senior Director, Climate-Resilient Food Systems, Environmental Defense Fund; Pamela Ruiter, Director, Global Agricultural Methane, Environmental Defense Fund; Derek Tepe, Project Manager, Global Agriculture Methane, Environmental Defense Fund
The Path to Lower Livestock Emissions
Livestock systems sit at the heart of both an opportunity and a challenge: they provide food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions worldwide while also being the single largest source of human-driven methane emissions. Cutting these emissions is one of the fastest, most impactful levers we have to slow near-term warming.
At New York Climate Week (September 2025), Spark Climate Solutions, the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC), Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Clean Air Task Force (CATF) convened experts, innovators, policymakers, and funders to explore how nutrition, genetics, and animal health paired alongside breakthrough innovations, can be aligned to drive meaningful and scalable emissions reductions. The conversation centered on how to strengthen the systems and incentives that make lower-emission livestock systems not only possible but profitable and scalable.
Livestock production is responsible for up to 32% of human-caused methane emissions. Meeting the dual challenges of feeding a growing population and reducing emissions requires a holistic systems approach grounded in sustainable productivity gains built on three pillars: improving animal nutrition, advancing genetics, and strengthening animal health—while enabling the adoption of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies. This challenge is global but highly context-dependent. Livestock systems vary by geography, scale, and culture, requiring solutions that are locally adapted and still globally scalable.
Optimization of productivity gains has historically delivered climate benefits: modern dairy cows now produce twice as much milk as 50 years ago, with 60% of that improvement attributable to genetics. Sustaining and expanding these gains will require regionally tailored support for farmers to adopt practices and technologies that are viable in practice, not just in theory.
Throughout the discussion, participants resonated with a core message: more productive animals produce more food and, therefore, emit less methane per unit of food. Although productivity targets must reflect regional and contextual realities, several pillars consistently underpin sustainable gains: adequate nutrition, steady genetic improvement, and strong animal health.
Healthy animals have lower mortality, therefore avoiding “wasted emissions”, and spend less energy fighting disease, redirecting that energy toward producing more milk or gaining more weight. Adequate nutrition and better pasture management lead to healthier animals, improving feed conversion, i.e. more milk and meat per unit of feed, and thereby lower emissions.
Selecting for animals with desired traits, such as better production, fertility, longevity, and heat stress resistance, ensures these powerful genes are additively built upon in future generations, creating herds that are more robust, productive, and resilient.
Over time, more productive systems require fewer animals to produce the same amount of food, a trend already visible in many countries that have invested in sustainable herd productivity. These gains bring multiple benefits: higher incomes, lower emissions per unit of food produced, and reduced pressure on land and ecosystems. This can be particularly impactful in livestock grazing systems, which represent the majority of cattle globally.
Importantly, productivity improvements often accompany technology adoption: farmers who increase their productivity are more likely to adopt novel methane-reducing innovations. Moreover, in regions where climate discussions remain sensitive or methane is not a top priority, a productivity-focused narrative can serve as an effective entry point for broader engagement.
Call for action: Achieving climate goals depends on faster global livestock productivity growth. Productivity, including in pasture-based systems, needs to rise 25% faster than historical rates to meet 2050 demand, representing 67% growth in beef, 58% in dairy, and 76% in sheep and goat production compared to 2010.
Achieving this will require coordinated, collaborative action: policy alignment, repurposed subsidies, focused investment in nutrition, animal health, and breeding, and robust technology transfer and extension mechanisms to ensure adoption at scale.
In addition to productivity gains, methane-reducing technologies must be adopted at scale. These include vaccines, feed additives, improved forage varieties, and genetic selection for animals that naturally produce less methane. The discussion highlighted the potential of these technologies to deliver scalable methane reductions and transform the environmental impact of livestock systems.
New studies show that their impact can be additive—and in some cases, multiplicative. For example, combining genetic improvements with vaccines has been shown to amplify both productivity and climate benefits. Vaccine solution providers are strategically targeting markets with lower regulatory barriers to accelerate deployment globally, while U.S. genetic improvements are spreading worldwide through semen exports, extending these productivity and emissions benefits to low- and middle-income countries.
Call for action: Achieving our climate goals will require sustained investment and coordinated effort to move breakthrough methane-reducing technologies from pilots to practice. Targeted collaboration can accelerate innovation, lower adoption barriers, and enable these solutions to scale across diverse livestock systems worldwide.
Methane is not only a greenhouse gas—it also represents a 2–12% loss of gross energy intake in cattle. Farmers stand to gain economically from solutions that capture this “wasted energy” by redirecting it toward meat and milk production while also benefiting from broader productivity improvements.
However, the farm-level economics must be clear. In many cases, the upfront cost of adopting known technologies is seen as risky, and access to finance remains limited, even when the return on investment (ROI) is positive. Additionally, in the case of breakthrough methane-reducing technologies, the ROI for farmers may not yet exist, significantly limiting adoption and slowing needed innovation pathways. Our panelists and participants emphasized the importance of strong market signals to catalyze funding toward the continuous development, scaling, and deployment of these solutions. They also called for supportive policies and market-based mechanisms that enable adoption at the farm level and throughout supply chains.
Creative and innovative financial mechanisms are already making an impact. Platforms have paid millions of dollars directly to farmers, demonstrating that credible finance pathways can drive rapid adoption. As one panelist noted: “Proposals with clear data make the investment page pop.” Data-backed approaches have already unlocked hundreds of millions in investment, such as the recent $360 million Dairy Interventions for Mitigation and Adaptation initiative in East Africa.
The call for action: Innovative, locally adapted policies and financing mechanisms are essential to signal market confidence, spur continued innovation in methane-reducing technologies, and make adoption viable and profitable for farmers at scale.
Reducing methane at scale requires proper measurement. Current tools face accuracy limitations: error rates of up to 30–40% make it difficult to distinguish small but meaningful reductions, undermining both credibility and the upper value ceiling of carbon credits. Direct measurement of emissions at the animal level remains the "holy grail," and real progress is underway. Emerging technologies are moving closer to narrowing error margins, while advances in AI software are already reducing costs and integrating varied data from farm operations seamlessly. Measurement isn’t just a technical issue: it underpins finance, adoption, and policy.
The call for action: Developing and deploying cost-effective, practical, and scalable methane measurement tools is essential, including in regions where locally generated data remain limited. While farm-level models are valuable, their assumptions and inputs must be validated with precise, field-based data to ensure accuracy and credibility. Strengthening these capabilities globally will help unlock finance, verify impact, and guide evidence-based policy and investment.
Technology adoption happens one farmer at a time. Peer-to-peer influence is consistently the most effective driver: farmers listen first to other farmers. Strong advisory and extension networks, particularly those integrating digital tools and services, can catalyze access to and engagement with new technologies and practices. Understanding and mapping stakeholder incentives for integrating innovations is key to overcoming barriers. Building trust, demonstrating tangible value, and ensuring sustainable farmer livelihoods are the cornerstones of successful adoption.
“This has to be farmer-led. This has to be a public-private partnership. This has to be profitable to be repeatable.” ~ Eamon Ryan, former Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Republic of Ireland
The call for action: Building change in collaboration with farmers is essential. Outreach should highlight the challenges but also the opportunities of integrated livestock production and environmental action. Trust is the foundation for attitude and behavior change, and leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and digital platforms present new pathways to reach farmers, accelerate communication, and translate awareness into action.
Momentum is building, but progress depends on more than just technology development. To make meaningful methane reductions in livestock systems, we need to:
With directed and strategic support from philanthropy, finance, and policy, livestock methane reductions can become a powerful lever for climate action while advancing food security, farmer livelihoods, and animal health worldwide.
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