CLEANED Lvcs - Concept Note Submitted to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, November 2012

CLEANED LVCs - Concept note submitted to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, November 2012

Comprehensive Livestock Environmental Assessment
for Improved Nutrition, a Secured Environment and Sustainable Development

along Livestock Value Chains
(CLEANED LVCs)

- a pilot study on smallholder dairy value chains in East Africa -

A proposal submitted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

and the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI)

Principal Investigators: Mario Herrero (ILRI/CSIRO) and Mats Lannerstad (SEI/ILRI)

Executive summary

The overall vision of the project is to contribute towards a pro-poor, environmentally responsible livestock sector in developing countries.

Through a pilot study with smallholder dairy farmers in East Africa the project aims to show proof of concept of a new environmental assessment framework. This framework will be designed to ensure that current and proposed actions designed to improve incomes and food security in livestock systems has a minimum environmental footprint while at the same time lifting people out of poverty.

Key objectives:

1. Addresses key knowledge gaps around the environmental tradeoffs and synergies associated with dairy intensification, which will allow for the identification of best practices that mitigate negative impacts and enhance win-win outcomes for productivity and the environment
2. Support the strategic priority of the BMGF agricultural development team to improve dairy productivity in the focus regions of East Africa
3. Partner strategically with local institutions to test the framework in the planning phase, and to
4. Assess the capacity of local partners to take up future work
5. Identify a local institution (or partnership between local actors) to take the lead on full implementation in the later phase

Expected outputs include:

i)A review of existing livestock relevant environmental assessment frameworks

ii)A new conceptual comprehensiveenvironmental framework for livestock value chains

iii)A down-scaled and specifically tailored framework for smallholder dairy production in East Africa

iv)Implement a proof of concept of the framework through a pilot study of smallholder dairy farms in the East Africa.

v)A broad and targeted effort to disseminate project results to relevant stakeholders, including peer reviewed articles and reports; manuals and guidance for “on the ground” practitioners; conference presentations; and consultation workshops.

vi)The project will feed into the ongoing work of CGIAR Research Program 3.7:More meat, milk and fish by and for the poor, and the grant-making process of BMGF, both with intermediate deliverables and final outputs.

The project consists of three modulessequentially feeding into each other. The core partners, ILRI (lead), SEI and CSIRO, will cooperate with selected partners for the different modules. Project duration will be 18 months, with a proposed budget of USD 626,505funded by BMGF. With additional ‘in kind’ funding from ILRI-CRP 3.7, USD 44,113, and from CSIRO, USD 62,075, the total projectbudget amounts to USD 732,693.

1. Rationale for the scoping study

The livestock sector provides livelihoods for 1 billion people, generates 40% of global agricultural GDP, and is a major contributor to food and nutrition security. Driven by continued population growth, rising affluence and urbanization global consumption of animal products is projected to double by 2050. Almost the entire increase will take place in less developed countries, which will generate as much as three-quarters of global meat production and two thirds of global milk output.

The potential for yield improvement is large in many countries. This is particularly true for livestock systems with ruminants, as cows, buffalos, goats and sheep. In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia (SA) the meat output relative to biomass feed for cattle is only 50% of the yield in Latin America, and 25% of the yield in industrialized countries. Also, milk production per cow is low in SSA and SA, at about half the level in Latin America.

1.1 Livestock revolution in SSA and SA increases the pressure on the environment

The ongoing demand-driven ‘Livestock Revolution’ presents genuine opportunities for livelihood improvement and income generation for resource limited smallholder farming systems in SSA and SA. An intensification of livestock production in these regions will also be required to respond to the growing demand for meat and dairy produce. Intensified animal rearing is demanding of resources. It appropriatescropland and pastures and affects key parameters such as water, nutrients and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, thus heightening the risk of undermining the resilience of ecosystems at multiple scales.

In the general debate on livestock production there tends to be a one-sided focus on its negative environmental impacts. However, the true picture is often much more diverse. Because secure smallholder livelihoods directly depend on a healthy local environment, it isimperative to show how more meat and milk can be produced with fewer negative impacts on local and regional ecosystem services, i.e. optimizing livestock intensification and environmental sustainability.

1.2To ensure that livestock is vehicle for sustainable development

The choice of options toincrease productivity and income in livestock systems needs to be supported with ex ante analyses of their environmental consequences in order to identify the scale of environmental concerns and to identify trade-offs, co-benefitsand,if necessary,mitigation measures. However, there is no consistent way to assess the value of resource use and ecosystem impacts related to livestock production. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop appropriate evaluation frameworks to ensure that investments in livestock production by private actors, public institutionsand donors can be examined from the perspective of environmental sustainability.

A frameworkthat appraises environmental impacts could help investors to develop management strategies to ensure sustainable realization of both short and long term multiple co-benefits, such as increased incomes and food production, and to sustain high quality ecosystem services. In today’s globalised world such investment strategies must be framed so thatglobal environmental issues are linked to the local system level (e.g. climate change and GHG emissions). Thus, a new multi-scale environmental framework must analyze the local farm system and the up-scaled impacts at, landscape, regional and global levels.Such analyses must consider “multiple” dimensions, taking into account a range of environmental indicators, e.g. GHG emissions andwater use.

1.3 Environmental framework for smallholder East African dairy value chains

A vision is thus to develop a multi-scale and multi-dimensional environmental impact framework that can be used for priority setting, toassure co-existence of environmental sustainability and improved livelihoods. Such a framework can be used as an environment sustainability tool to estimate bio-economic ex ante environmental impacts, to monitor ex post impacts, and to prioritize best practices to guide effective investment in any livestock value chain. It can enable studies of trade-offs between environmental impacts and livelihoods/food security impacts in livestock systems, and provide information to link local-scale impacts and potential changes to frameworks for global integrated assessments of the food system. In particular,it must highlight how environmental impacts impinge on livestock rearing smallholders and rural development.

The proposed study aims to review existing environmental frameworksrelevant to livestock production, synthesize the results and build a first conceptual version of a comprehensive environmental framework. The framework will then be tailored for application for smallholder dairy value chains in East Africa. The pilot study will thus be used as a proof of concept of a generic framework for environmental assessments of livestock production.

Four spatial scales will captured by the framework:

• Field/plot: At field level land management anduse and reuse of inputs directly enhance or decrease crop and livestock production, and cause environmental impacts.
• Landscape/river basin: Poor farmers depend on the immediate environment being used sustainably. Actions on field level will accumulate and play out at landscape/basin level.
• Regional: To capture direct environmental linkages across regions, e.g. when feed and fodder is retrieved from distant areas to satisfy local deficits.
• Global: To estimate global impacts and feedbacks from local production, e.g. GHGs.

Processes related to environmental impacts ofthe analyzed dairy value chains will be assessed at relevant temporal scales, e.g. 10, 20 or 40 years.

The implementation of the environmental framework for dairy chains in Easter Africa will:

• Assess the environmental baselines of the analyzed dairy systems (current status)
• Assess the environmental impacts of development interventions (technologies, management practices and policies), including impacts on, e.g.:
• Greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 and CH4), mitigation options and efficiencies per unit of product
• Water use and productivity
• Nutrient cycles and soil fertility (especially C, N and P)
• Biomass use and trade-offs (feedvs. food production)
• Land use and trade-offs with other components of farming systems (food crops, feed crops, pastures, cash crops, biofuel crops, biodiversity etc.)
• Assess the environmental consequences of up-scaling developing interventions to the regional level, e.g.,what will be the result if a significant number of dairy farmers adopt certain practices?
• Spatial targeting of dairy production areas that are hotspots for environmental concerns and present opportunities in potential management change.

In conclusion, the project will contribute to ensure long-term environmental sustainability of investments in pro-poor smallholder livestock development, with particular focus on dairy value chains in Eastern Africa. Success in productivity growth that improvesthe livelihoods of farmers will thus be anchored in environmentally assessed interventions.

1.4 Relevance to ongoing livestock projects, networksand core competences

This proposed project willsupport the BMGF Agricultural Policies and Livestock strategies.Our project output – a pilot study of a new comprehensive environmental framework – can directly contribute to the development and assessment of new grants from the BMGF by developing and testing methods to evaluate potential environmental impacts from proposed research and development grants.

Our project has direct synergies with the current reform of the CGIAR through its implementation in the CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs), notably CRP3.7: More Meat, Milk and Fish, by and for the Poor (led by ILRI); CRP7: Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security; CRP5: Water, Land and Ecosystems; andCRP2: Policies and institutions, among others.

BMGF’s request for this project is exceptionally timely in relation to the ongoing work to incorporate the environmental dimension into the CRP 3.7 (see above). This work is already commissioned to the Sustainable Livestock Futures team under Mario Herrero/An Notenbaert, and will add to already existing program components that focus on production and development.

Furthermore, our team is uniquely placed to develop this project because it has a long track record and relevant competences in environmental assessment, particularly of smallholder livestock systems; development of exante impact assessments of technologies and policies in developing world agriculture; assessment of climate change impacts; mitigation of greenhouse gases; water use and productivity analyses; vulnerability of smallholder systems; land use change; among others. ILRI and partners are also experienced in implementing livestock development projects of different sizes in the developing world.

SEI is an international research institutethat does rigorous and objective scientific analysis to support improved policymaking. For more than 20years the institute has been engaged in environment and development research at local, national, regional and global policy levels. Core competences relevant for this proposal are ecosystem impact assessments and development of M&E for sustainable resource use in agricultural development. Recenttrack record includes work in BMGF’s AgWater Solutions project together with IWMI, IFPRI, IDE and FAO, and various products for water management, including back-stopping for UNEP, UNCCD and FAO.

Key initiativesthat include an extensive network of partnerships in the livestock field include:

• Global Agenda of Action for Sustainable Livestock Production: A united effort by stakeholders in the livestock sector to increase sustainability of livestock systems through policies, technology development, awareness raising, public-private partnerships and synthesis reports. ILRI is a steering committee member together with World Bank, FAO, AU-IBAR, EMBRAPA, and local partners, among others.

• Greenhouse Gas Research Alliance (GRA): An initiative led by New Zealandthat aims to promote mitigation of greenhouse gases from livestock systems globally. ILRI is a steering committee member of this initiative.

• Team members are involved in the IPCC greenhouse gas inventory task force and the mitigation group representing livestock (Herrero).

• During the last two years SEI, together with ILRI, and partners from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) have carried out a comprehensive system-based assessments of consumptive water use in livestock production. Insights gained, and continued research, will be important inputs to the proposed framework (Lannerstad).

2. Project outline, aims and deliverables

The proposed project is divided into threemodules, each being a building block to address the overall goal and vision of the project. The timeframe is 18 months (see Figure1).

2.1 Module I: Review of existing environmental frameworks

Deliverables:

a)Overview of existingenvironmental frameworks relevant to livestock

1. Indicators included
2. Analytical approaches

A desk study of existing frameworksused for (or potentiallyuseful for)analyses of environmental impacts and sustainability along different livestock value chains will list and categorize these frameworks, and identify best practices and indicators.The results of this study will form the basis for developing a new comprehensive framework in Module II.

Examples of larger initiatives that will be evaluated are: The Tradeoff Analysis (TOA) project; the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM); Vital Signs (earlier namedAfrican Monitoring System, AMS); Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB); Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE); and AgBalance (BASF). The study will also review Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approaches used for livestock production systems by colleagues at CSIRO, and partners at Wageningen University and the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK).

2.2 Module II:High level expert consultationon smallholderdairy livestockenvironmentframework

Deliverables:

a)Mapping of dairy stakeholders in the region

b)High level expert panel meeting

1. Consultation on synthesis of Module I
2. Consultation on the building blocks of a generic livestock-environment framework
3. Consultation on draft framework for smallholder dairy value chains in EA

c)Draft environmental framework for smallholder dairy value chains in East Africa (EA)

d)Revised report from Module I incorporating expert consultation input

e)Applicable detailed environmental framework for smallholder dairy value chains in EA

1. A set of environmental indicators
2. Data to collect
3. Protocol for data collection
4. Analytical approaches and methods

A draft environmental framework for smallholder dairy value chains in East Africa will be outlined based on the synthesis of existing environmental frameworks in Module I. The overview from Module I will show if existing environmental frameworks can be used to cover relevant indicators along the selected dairy livestock value chains. Identified gaps regarding indicators and methods will be complemented by development of new framework components.

A stakeholder mapping exercise will be undertaken. The aim is to identify key stakeholders, assess their capacity as well as the linkages between them. An initial deskstudy will inform this mapping exercise, but it will be complemented with site visits and face-to-face interviews. This methodology often results in“snowballing” whereby further contacts (and support) are garnered through introductions. The specific aim is to scope for local partners, for the pilot study and for potential future work, and specifically partners that can take the lead on full implementation in a later phase.

During a two-day high level consultation invited expertswill give input to the synthesis from Module I and the draft version of the environmental framework for dairy value chains in East Africa. The discussions and dialogues during the workshop will ensure that all existing frameworks have been considered and that the framework is anchored in the larger livestock research for developmentcommunity. Invitees to the consultation will include experts (e.g. CSIRO, ILRI, FAO, actors along the dairy value chain in Eastern Africa, like farmers and the dairy industry (small and large scale), and representatives from the successful smallholder dairy expansion in India (the ‘white revolution’) and donors that are active in East Africa (i.e. the Sida Representative at the Swedish Embassy in Nairobi). The workshop will also strengthen the ties to the local partners.

To ensure a successful workshop setup a number of smaller planning meetings will precede the consultation. To attain desired input from invited experts and reach a well-structured synthesis the consultation meeting will be thoroughly designed and moderated by a professional facilitator. During a follow-up workshop the core team will compile the findings from the high level consultation. The first output will be a report (i.e. revised synthesis from Module I) of existing frameworks related to environmental impacts and tradeoffs related to livestock production and productivity development, with a list of key criteria. The second output is a specified and finalized environmental framework for smallholder dairy value chains in EA that can be implemented in Module III.

2.3 Module III:Testing the framework - implementing a pilot study

Deliverables:

a)Piloting of the framework at 3–4 dairy farms/hubsat selected EADD/CRP 3.7sites

1. Testing data collection protocol
2. Analysis of collected data
3. Review and refinement of framework

b)Summary of environmental impacts of the studied dairy system

c)Consultation on the pilot findings

1. Workshop for stakeholder consultation and expert elicitation on the pilot study implementation and outcomes
2. Report from consultation

d)CLEANED LVCs manual for smallholder dairy value chains in EA