The CLEANED Approach for Flagging and Addressing Environmental Issues

While livestock presents an important livelihood strategy for many smallholders, it is also held responsible for important environmental impacts. In this paper, we used an online survey to identify the perceptions of global livestock experts on environmental impacts of livestock and how these might be tackled. We then explored how the CLEANED environmental ex-ante assessment tool (Comprehensive Livestock Environmental Assessment for improved Nutrition, a secured Environment and sustainable Development = CLEANED) responds to this and how it can be used to influence decision making towards more environmentally-friendly livestock production. According to the survey, there was general agreement between researchers, development practitioners and policy makers alike that livestock production systems are at risk of global environmental change while at the same time contributing to it. The major risks are perceived to be climate-related. The major impacts associated with livestock production, on the other hand, are considered to be land-related (degradation and competition for land), closely followed by pressure on water and GHG emissions. More sustainable livestock production practices are cited as most promising to reducing livestock’s environmental impact. The preferred technologies include managed grazing, improved pastures, silvo-pastoral systems and planted forages. A lack of rapidly available, site- and system-specific knowledge about such solutions and their potential environmental impacts are considered an important barrier to their successful implementation. The CLEANED environmental ex-ante assessment model aims to fill part of this gap. It can compare the relevant environmental impact indicators of the different solutions brought forward. The model has also been designed to be flexible when applied to a wide variety of contexts and provide systems-specific results. The expert survey further revealed that researchers, development practitioners and policy makers all based decisions on information, obtained from a variety of sources such as journal papers, internet searches and professional networks. The importance of journal papers, however, decreases as an information source from researchers over policy makers to development practitioners, while the use of professional networks and internet searches increases for these groups. This finding points to the importance of the participatory approach taken by the CLEANED team and the need to present results in appropriate multi-stakeholder forums and targeted internet posts. Further recommendations are made for increasing the use of the tool, i.e. making the outputs from the tool easier to interpret and training a variety of stakeholders in its use

Climate change adaptation through planted forages in Southern Highlands, Tanzania

Smallholder farmers (SF) are the biggest food producers in Tanzania (TZ), where hetero- geneous mixed crop-livestock farming systems dominate agriculture (Fig 1). Feed scarcity and quality are major issues facing smallholder dairy farmers in Tanzania. Climate projections for Tanzania indicate increased length of dry seasons and severity of periodic droughts. These expected impacts will affect farm productivity, leaving farmers more vulnerable. The planting of improved grass and legume forages, if properly managed, has the potential to improve livestock productivity and resilience which can help SF adapt to climate chang