ANIMALCHANGE will provide scientific guidance on the integration of adaptation and mitigation objectives and design sustainable development pathways for livestock production in Europe, in Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. ANIMALCHANGE will inform public policy development in EU27 and propose cooperation programs addressing smallholder livestock farming in selected developing countries. The core analytical spine of the project is a series of coupled biophysical and socio-economic models combined with experimentation. This allows exploring future scenarios for the livestock sector under baseline and atmospheric CO2 stabilization scenarios. These scenarios are first constructed in Component (CP) 1. They are elaborated and enriched by breakthrough mitigation and adaptation options from CP 2 at field and animal scales, integrated and evaluated at farm scale in CP 3 and used to assess policy options and their socio-economic consequences in CP 4.

ANIMALCHANGE will:
- Quantify and reduce uncertainties in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and assess climate change impacts on livestock systems (including grasslands)
- Revise estimates of the GHG balance of livestock systems and integrate soil carbon sequestration
- Integrate climate variability and extremes into the assessment of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of livestock systems to climate change
- Develop breakthrough technologies for adaptation and mitigation to climate change for both ruminants and monogastrics
- Study and quantify trade-offs and synergies between adaptation and mitigation options
- Assess the potential societal and sectoral costs and benefits of these options for the livestock sector in Europe and in study regions of Africa and Latin America
- Assess climate change vulnerability of animal production and of associated GHG emissions
- Provide direct support through the design of an integrated and consistent mitigation and adaptation policy framework for the livestock sector...