CIHEAM Zaragoza is a partner of Re-Livestock, a European research project that has kicked off this month and will run for 5 years. The aim of the project is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production systems and increase their capacity to adapt to climate change through innovative practices applied at different scales (animal, herd, farm, sector and region).

New feeding systems, waste recycling, grazing management, redesign of livestock housing, manure management practices, and advances in genetic improvement to reduce the carbon footprint and the impact of climate change on livestock farming are only some of the challenges that the 37 partners from 14 European countries and Australia will be addressing, under the coordination of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), in close collaboration with the European livestock industry.

The CIHEAM team in Zaragoza will be taking on the tasks of technical and scientific training and dissemination of the project results.

As pointed out by Antonio López-Francos, research project coordinator at CIHEAM Zaragoza: “Re-Livestock will put forward and test novel ideas across different disciplines including nutrition, genetics, animal welfare and environmental assessment, to develop livestock systems with lower [greenhouse] gas emissions, more capable of adapting to climate change, which is fundamental for their sustainability”.

Re-Livestock is financed by Horizon Europe. It has a total budget of 13.5 million euros, of which 415,000 € will be assigned to the work undertaken by the team at CIHEAM Zaragoza.