MELS
Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from livestock systems
The aim of this project is to gather knowledge on greenhouse gas mitigation measures in livestock production that are currently available or technically well-established. A special focus is on manure management. Methods will further be developed to implement and document the mitigation measures use at the farm and national scales.
The EU Effort Sharing Agreement and the Paris Agreement create challenging targets for GHG emission reductions and represent respectively short and long term existential threats to livestock production systems.
The MELS project will build on the Global Research Alliance DATAMAN project by collating additional data on emissions from manure management and activity /ancillary data. The data will be used to generate functional relationships between emissions and activity/ancillary variables, enabling a refinement of national inventories and better assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a range of mitigation measures. MELS will assess and recommend improvements to existing farm-scale decision support systems (DSSs) in relation to GHG emissions from livestock production systems, including grazing ruminants, by refining the calculations used to account for emissions. A prototype farm-scale DSS will be developed for countries lacking such a tool and implemented in at least one country. This will allow the consequences of mitigation strategies on emissions and costs to be more accurately quantified and better documented, both at the national and farm scales.
Coordinator
Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy, ATB, Germany
Barbara Amon
Project partners
TEAGASC - Agriculture and Food Development Authority, Ireland
Cork University Business, CUBS, Ireland
Aarhus University, AU, Denmark
Institut national de la recherche agronomique, INRAE, France
University of Zielona Góra, UZG, Poland
Agricultural University of Athens, AUA, Greece
AgResearch, AgR, New Zealand
Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias, INIA, Chile
Total requested funding
1,069,900 €
Start-end date
01.01.2020-31.12.2022
Project duration
36 months
Project website and social media
Twitter: @EragasMels
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NEWS from MELS
2020.05.18
The MELS (Mitigating greenhouse gas Emissions from Livestock Systems) project started with the kick-off meeting on the 21st and 22nd of January in Poznań (Poland). The meeting was jointly organized by the University of Zielona Góra and by the Poznań University of Life Sciences. MELS is focused on achieving results of global value, integrating partners from New Zealand and Chile, as well as from Germany, Poland, Greece, Ireland, France, Poland, and Denmark. It is accompanied by scientific advisory board members from the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, China and Brazil). Following the current travel restrictions, a physical workshop planned for March was replaced by a weekly series of video conference workshops that worked very well. MELS partners learned experiences from data analysis from DATAMAN, a Global Research Alliance project, and started to work on assessing functional relationships between emissions, management and environmental variables with the propose to suggest effective mitigation measures and implement these into national emission inventories.