Exploring the frontier of bovine protein production within territorial net zero emission targets

Global and national environmental targets for the Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) sector need to be reconciled with increasing food and protein demands of a growing global population. Meeting climate targets in AFOLU is a tremendous challenge in countries with high ruminant livestock production and small forest carbon sinks. Using GOBLIN, an integrated assessment model that utilises a back-casting approach, 2187 future AFOLU configuration scenarios are explored to investigate whether current levels of bovine protein production in Ireland are compatible with net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. Seven proven GHG mitigation measures are combined at three levels of ambition and screened according to three definitions of net zero based on the GWP100 metric, with a focus on the integration of clover-based grasslands. Net zero was achieved in 19 % of scenarios when all GHGs require balancing by 2050. The current livestock herd configuration was incompatible with net zero, which required at least 1.5 million ha of grassland to be diverted from livestock production towards climate-positive land uses, including afforestation of close to 10 % of terrestrial land area by 2050. When applying less stringent net zero definitions based on a split gas approach, up to 63 % of explored scenarios achieved net zero. Independent of net zero definition (which must be internationally fair and transparent), results indicate that bovine protein production can only be maintained through very high deployment of ambitious technical abatement measures, alongside major land use transformation requiring large-scale structural changes in the agriculture sector.