Adapting livestock methane mitigation strategies to local requirements with Ermias Kebreab UC Davis
Description
Climate change is a global challenge, but interventions can only be implemented locally. Understanding the local cultures, economies, politics, language, and production systems is critical for any intervention to make an impact. Across the developing world the greatest opportunity to limit livestock methane emissions and improve food security is through improved animal nutrition and livestock genetics. In the developed world the opportunity lies in absolute methane emission reductions with genetics, the use of feed additives, and increasingly through a much improved understanding of the microbiome having the greatest potential to make significant impact.
Ermias Kebreab from UC Davis has been leading efforts to improve sustainability and reduce the climate impact of agriculture across the developed and developing worlds.
Across the Global South he has been working with farmers to develop digital tools and feed libraries in local languages to enable farmers to improve their productivity, efficiency of production, and reduce methane emissions. He started working in Vietnam alongside the State Department 10 years ago. Through the support of the Global Methane Hub these programs have now been extended to include Thailand, Philippines, India, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and a number of West African countries coordinated in Cameroon.
To achieve the absolute reduction in emissions needed across the Global North Ermias is working with UC Berkeley using CRISPR and meta genomics to identify microbes and the genes that are responsible for methanogenesis. A critical component of this is also understanding what happens to the hydrogen because if you can redirect the hydrogen away from methane you can improve productivity and feed efficiency at the same time as reducing emissions. This win win is a huge advantage in achieving wide spread farmer adoption and is equally applicable to lower income countries and wealthy countries.
I recently caught up with Ermias to discuss his work. You can listen to the conversation here.
United States
