Facilitating Innovations for Resilient Livestock Farming Systems - Re-Design of circular systems

Climate change, driven mainly by greenhouse gas emissions, poses major challenges for the livestock sector, which contributes significantly to these emissions. Livestock farming can also impact land quality, water, air, and biodiversity. In turn, climate change threatens livestock systems by reducing feed availability, increasing heat stress, and intensifying competition for natural resources, just as global demand for animal products continues to rise. Because livestock systems vary widely, effective responses must be tailored to local conditions, requiring integrated approaches and greater research investment.

Re-Livestock promotes a holistic, systems-based approach to climate-smart livestock farming through the ‘Re-Concept’, which rethinks mitigation and adaptation across feeding, breeding, and system design.

• Re-Evaluating feeding systems, the project explores multi-species grasslands (including agroforestry), alternative feed sources (e.g., insects, legumes, by-products), and improved feed assessment methods that consider biodiversity and greenhouse gas impacts.
• Re-Exploring animal capacity, it advances breeding for resilience and reduced methane emissions by integrating genomic and metabolomic tools. It emphasizes both local and high-performing breeds to address regional adaptation needs and system diversity.
• Re-Designing livestock systems, Re-Livestock bridges two narratives: eco-efficiency (doing more with less) and sufficiency (staying within ecological limits). It supports both intensified and agroecological approaches, aiming for system-level innovation.

A participatory, multi-actor approach underpins the project. It actively involves farmers, breeders, and technology providers to co-design solutions tailored to local conditions, ensuring innovations are both practical and impactful. Through this integrative strategy, Re-Livestock aims to reshape livestock systems for climate resilience and long-term sustainability.

Objective

To co-develop, test, and promote climate-smart innovations that reduce emissions and enhance the resilience of livestock systems by integrating scientific, stakeholder, and policy-driven approaches. The project supports this through cross-scale innovation, environmental and socio-economic assessment, and participatory roadmap building for transition.

Specific Research Question – Work Package 6

European livestock systems face increasing pressure to become more circular, resource-efficient, and climate-resilient. However, there is currently a lack of modeling tools that can integrate environmental impacts (nitrogen, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions) and global feedbacks to inform system redesign in a circular bioeconomy context.

Method

WP6 aims to build and apply a suite of integrated models (Re-Model) to explore redesign pathways for livestock systems within a circular bioeconomy framework. It will:

• Link the CiFoS model with LPJmL to assess biomass availability under advanced climate scenarios.
• Integrate CiFOS with the Livestock Spatial Allocation Model (LSAM) to evaluate spatial impacts on nutrient, carbon, and water cycles.
• Simulate how innovations from WP1–WP4 can be scaled regionally to enhance circularity and system resilience in Europe/Globally.
• Assess global implications of European circular strategies on feed/food security elsewhere through global CiFOS-LPJmL runs.

(Expected) results

Expected Results from WP6 – Re-Design of Circular Systems

• A modelling suite (Re-Model) integrating CiFOS, LPJmL, and LSAM to simulate circular food and livestock systems.
• Scenarios and redesign pathways for food and livestock systems that enhance circularity, resource use efficiency, and climate resilience.
• Spatially explicit assessments of environmental impacts (nitrogen, greenhouse gas emissions, land use) of different livestock system configurations across Europe and globally.
• Insights on trade-offs and synergies between climate goals and food security at both European and global levels.
• Policy-relevant evidence supporting the transition to circular, climate-smart livestock systems.