Sustainable niche for farmed animals in food systems What: Abstract below Project Info Page: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/agroecology/sustainable-niche-for-farmed-animals-in-food-systems When: Friday, June 12th, 12:00-13:00 Where: Ostrom, SRC Please bring your lunch and join use for the discussion. Abstract Livestock production and consumption of animal-derived products carry diverse food security, agronomic, and socio-economic values within food systems, alongside substantial environmental costs. This complexity drives polarised discourses on the role of livestock in food systems, where agricultural sciences and decision-making often misalign with the understanding provided by sustainability sciences. We aimed to bridge these perspectives by deriving principles under which livestock use can be considered sustainable. Through an umbrella review of academic literature, we identified over 50 sustainability ideals for livestock production and consumption, which we examined through the frameworks of consumption and production corridors, proposing a hierarchical structuring of derived principles. Fundamental principles — referring to the social floor and environmental ceiling — function as boundary conditions for sustainable livestock use, determined by biophysical and physiological processes. Within these boundaries, livestock satisfies multiple universal human needs pertaining to justice and provides additional socio-economic values; both are context-dependent and socially negotiable, and many such needs can also be met through alternatives to livestock. We further argue that many ideals cited in the literature are, in fact, solutions for improved production, consumption, and governance design: tools and pathways toward more sustainable use, rather than definitions of sustainability itself. The totality of impacts from production and consumption achievable through such designs must be evaluated against boundary conditions and principles of justice. We therefore define a Sustainable Niche for Livestock (SNL) as the range of livestock consumption and production that satisfies human needs without exceeding environmental boundaries, and in ways that enable all people to meet their needs now and in the future. We illustrate the organisation of principles within the SNL and describe key challenges in quantifying such niches at national, continental, and global scales relevant to food security governance.

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Rachel Mazac

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