About

MELS builds on the Global Research Alliance DATAMAN project, which aims to improve understanding of the key variables affecting greenhouse gas emissions from livestock manure and to develop algorithms to estimate those emissions.

MELS will contribute by collating additional data on emissions from manure management and activity/ancillary data. The data will be used to generate functional relationships between emissions and activity/ancillary variables, enabling a refinement of national inventories and better assessment of the cost-effectiveness of a range of mitigation measures.

The project will assess and recommend improvements to existing farm-scale decision support systems (DSSs) in relation to greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from livestock production systems, including grazing ruminants, by refining the calculations used to account for emissions.

A prototype farm-scale DSS will be developed for countries lacking such a tool and implemented in at least one country. This will allow the consequences of mitigation strategies on emissions and costs to be more accurately quantified and better documented, both at the national and farm scales.

Results

Current estimates of the potential for reducing GHG emissions using existing measures are about 30% for enteric CH₄ emissions and 20-30% for soil CH₄ and N₂O emissions. Higher emission reductions are achievable using measures applied to manure management, but depend crucially on the context under which they are implemented.

• MELS will allow the effect of the context to be better taken into account at the national and farm scales.

The enhancement of the DATAMAN database will provide a resource for uncertainty reduction in the generation of national inventories. At the national scale, improved emission methodologies are useful only if accompanied by appropriate and documented activity data, difficult and expensive to collect. 

• MELS will identify how this could be achieved using existing and new technologies.

At the farm scale, GHG accounting can be used to support policies ranging from information campaigns, through subsidies, taxation and emission-intensity market mechanisms, to obligatory implementation of mitigation measures.

• MELS will help maintain confidence in the integrity of the calculations by indicating where standardisation is appropriate and by identifying methods to maintain transparency. 
• MELS will develop generic methods to link the efficiencies of mitigation measures to their costs, allowing more informed decisions at the farm and national scales.