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Instead of a Climate Villain, Livestock Can Be a Solution With Legs
For places where livestock is deeply embedded in livelihoods and culture, it is critical to see these farm animals from our perspective and help channel climate and biodiversity finance into their potential as a force for good.
Oct 08, 2024
Livestock are a vital component of both the African food system and rural livelihoods. The continent has around 400 million cattle alone, and the livestock sector accounts for a significant 30-40% of the total agricultural gross domestic product across the continent.
Small amounts of meat, milk and eggs can have life-changing benefits in tackling malnutrition, and these animals also provide a reliable income source when alternatives simply do not readily exist.
Yet, from an environmental perspective, livestock are often perceived only as a problem, contributing to habitat loss, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This narrow view can hold back much-needed finance into the sector, yet it misses a much more nuanced reality.
International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.
As the United Nations prepares for three major environmental meetings over the next few months—on biodiversity conservation, climate change, and land management, respectively—it is important for the world to rethink how it perceives livestock in the context of development progress, and to begin to see such animals as cows, goats, camels, and pigs as “solutions with legs” in combating these intensifying climate and environmental crises at scale.
For countries like Kenya, where livestock is deeply embedded in livelihoods and culture, it is critical for U.N. meetings to see these farm animals from our perspective and help channel climate and biodiversity finance into their potential as a force for good.
Firstly, contrary to popular belief, livestock can be powerful agents of biodiversity conservation when managed correctly. Well-managed grazing systems help maintain ecosystems, control invasive species, and foster the regeneration of diverse native plant life in degraded areas. Pastoralist communities in Kenya, from the Maasai to the Samburu, have long understood this, using livestock grazing as a tool to balance ecosystems and promote biodiversity while providing essential sources of income and producing almost 20% of Kenya’s milk.
And in many conservancies, livestock are intentionally integrated into wildlife conservation strategies. Cattle are grazed rotationally, mimicking natural patterns seen in wild herbivores like zebras and gazelles. This approach helps prevent overgrazing, maintains healthy grasslands, and supports both livestock and wildlife populations.
Secondly, in terms of climate action, the role of livestock is often framed solely around their methane emissions, particularly in the case of ruminant animals like cattle. However, the potential for livestock to contribute to climate solutions is much broader, particularly in places like Africa.
In terms of mitigation, improved rangeland management and the adoption of climate-smart feeding practices can significantly reduce livestock-related emissions. For instance, integrating climate-resilient forages into grazing systems improves both productivity and environmental outcomes.
Moreover, sustainable grazing practices can play a crucial role in lowering the emissions intensity of meat and dairy production through carbon sequestration. Rangelands, often considered wastelands, are actually some of the planet’s largest carbon sinks. When managed properly, they store significant amounts of carbon in their soils, and proper management can contribute as much as 20.92 gigatons of climate mitigation by 2050.
On the adaptation front, livestock are a critical lifeline for communities facing increasing climate variability, including in Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands. By moving their livestock across landscapes in response to rainfall variability, pastoralists effectively manage scarce resources while avoiding overgrazing.
This adaptive mobility, coupled with the use of Indigenous livestock breeds adapted to harsh climates, provides a critical buffer against droughts and other climate stresses—even more so when index-based livestock insurance is available. The East African Zebu cattle, for example, are better equipped to survive on limited, poor-quality forage in dry conditions, making them crucial to climate resilience in Kenya.
Lastly, as the global land degradation crisis worsens, it is becoming increasingly clear that sustainable livestock management can be a tool for land restoration and rehabilitation. Somewhere between 25% and 35% of rangelands globally suffer from some form of degradation. If left unattended, they become unproductive, reducing food security and driving people to abandon rural areas. Livestock systems can actually help reverse this trend by promoting soil health and regenerating landscapes.
Sustainable grazing practices, including rotational grazing and controlled stocking densities, allow grasslands to recover and restore soil fertility. By moving livestock strategically across the land, these practices prevent overgrazing and promote the growth of deep-rooted plants, which stabilise the soil and improve water retention. Furthermore, healthy rangelands support a wide variety of plant species, protect watersheds, and improve overall ecosystem resilience.
Which begs the question, if livestock are so critical to all these environmental issues, why does the sector receive so little funding? International climate finance should prioritise support for sustainable livestock systems, recognizing their unique role in tackling broad environmental challenges while providing food, livelihoods, and economic growth.
Livestock are not the enemy in this fight. Rather, they are an integral part of the solution, especially in places like Africa where pastoralist and livestock-keeping communities depend on them for survival.
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The Violence Against Women Act Turns 30 Today—But Are We Still Failing Survivors?
Last week, Rebecca Cheptegei's children watched their mother burn right before their eyes. This type of horror happens in the United States, too.
Sep 13, 2024
As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) this September 13, the horrific death of Olympic runner Rebecca Cheptegei, who was set on fire by her ex-boyfriend just last week, reminds us that the fight against domestic violence is far from over. While domestic violence is sometimes portrayed as a scourge relegated to developing countries, it remains a significant and deeply troubling issue right here in the U.S., too, affecting individuals and families across all communities, regardless of socioeconomic status. Each day, three women die in the United States because of domestic violence; a woman is beaten by an intimate partner every 9 minutes; and 1 in 4 women will experience severe intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Yet headlines still manage to get their stories wrong and movies like the recent blockbuster It Ends with Us do a disservice to correctly capturing the experience of victims. The Violence Against Women Act, when it was passed in 1994, was a landmark step in addressing this issue. But the challenges that survivors face have changed in the last thirty years - while the paltry protections offered them have largely remained stagnant. We have a long way to go in supporting women, particularly in terms of enforcement and support for survivors.
On any given day in the United States, 13,335 requests for victim services go unmet due to a lack of funding. Of those unmet requests, 54% are for safe housing. Intimate partner violence has worsened in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, with calls to domestic violence hotlines spiking. Affordable and safe housing is one of the biggest barriers that survivors face when leaving an abuser; in fact, domestic violence is one of the main causes of homelessness for women and children - 63% of homeless women have been victims of domestic violence. In 2023, the federal government gave out $43.1 million in grants for transitional housing for domestic violence victims – but this is pennies compared with other federal grants, such as the $7.5 billion currently allotted for electric car charging stations. Having an immediate place to live is a matter of life and death for many victims. More funding, particularly for shelters and permanent affordable housing for victims and their children, is absolutely essential in 2024.
In addition to increasing funding for services, we must enforce laws that are already on the books. When a gun is present in a home where there is a domestic violence situation, a woman is five times more likely to be killed. Nearly half of the 4,484 women killed in 47 major U.S. cities from 2008-2018 died at the hands of an intimate partner. Many victims seek protection for themselves through civil restraining orders, but their abusers still have access to firearms because of poor enforcement, loopholes in licensing laws, such as the boyfriend loophole, and the proliferation of ghost guns (firearms assembled from kits without the usual serial numbers and background checks on purchasers). In my twenty years as an attorney representing victims of domestic violence, I cannot recall a single case where a defendant was forced by the courts or law enforcement to give up his guns. Shockingly, we operate on the “honor system,” which relies on abusers to voluntarily relinquish their firearms.
The result is that, this summer in Chicago, a 31 year-old mother of three was shot in the chest and murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Back in 2022, she had obtained a restraining order and requested seizure of his firearms, which the judge outright ignored. In July 2020, a California man shot and killed his wife in front of their children. The victim had an active restraining order at the time, and had informed the court that her husband had a gun and provided details of him threatening her with it in an application for a restraining order. Yet the judge accepted the man’s answer of “no” when asked whether he had any firearms. In 2017, a woman in St. Louis was shot by an ex-boyfriend four times through her apartment window. Police found an active restraining order lying on top of a microwave just a few feet from her body.
These homicide victims did everything they could under the law to protect themselves, but our system failed them. The landmark gun case decided by the Supreme Court in June, United States v. Rahimi, should have shined a spotlight on this gap – the defendant Rahimi was found in possession of firearms months after a civil restraining order was issued against him (arising from domestic abuse), which specifically banned him from having them. The Supreme Court validated the constitutionality of stripping him of his Second Amendment rights in this context. But we are not actually stripping abusers of their guns. There is a simple fix: when law enforcement serves a defendant with a protective order, and the victim has affirmed under oath that he has access to guns, these guns should be confiscated on the spot by the police.
Life is devastatingly complicated for victims with children. Many women make rational decisions to remain in abusive situations because the alternative may be worse for themselves and their children. Abusers use the court system to control their victims, by filing for custody for example, if their victim dares to leave. Under the current judicial climate, the “default” order is shared legal and physical custody, even in domestic violence situations. I see this time and again as an attorney – victim parents are not believed and are forced to comply with custody orders that perpetuate the abusive power dynamic. Over a decade ago, a study by the Department of Justice found that abusers do, in fact, use decision-making in shared parenting to regain control (by not agreeing to anything the victim wants, for example) and that they use visitation exchanges to harass and assault victims. But still we issue orders that have little regard for this evidence. Taken to the extreme, this results in outrageous situations like the one recently faced by a Colorado woman: Rachel Pickrel-Hawkins was jailed last week for refusing to comply with a custody order that provided for visitation to her ex-husband who had been criminally charged for sexually assaulting their daughters.
The myth that contact with an abusive parent is always beneficial for a child must be dispelled. Cases with two safe parents are not the same as cases with an alleged abuser. Tragically, a 2023 study found that in the last 15 years, over 900 children involved in contested custody cases (ones litigated in court) had been murdered, mostly by abusive fathers. In many of these cases, judges disbelieved or minimized reports of abuse and gave the killers the access they needed to their children.
Finally, providing family court judges with generalized “training” in domestic violence, as we do now, is not effective. Professionals without more specialized training tend to believe that women make false reports and that abusive parents pose little safety to their children. Moving forward, judges should be required to undergo more rigorous and comprehensive training in the nuances of domestic violence and the risks to victims and their children of post separation custody orders.
Just last week, Rebecca Cheptegei’s children watched their mother burn right before their eyes. This type of horror happens in the United States, too. "I was bleeding on the baby"—this is what the Chicago mother told the judge when pleading her case for an emergency restraining order prior to her murder in July. These monstrous deaths—everywhere around the world—are a vile reminder that domestic violence does not discriminate by geography, profession, or status. We must commit to combating this epidemic, strengthening laws like VAWA, and ensuring that they are backed by sufficient resources and legal mechanisms which actually work to protect victims.
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Death of 40 Haitians in Boat Fire Shows 'Crucial Need' for Safe, Legal Migration: UN
"Haiti's socio-economic situation is in agony," said one advocate. "The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more."
Jul 19, 2024
United Nations experts on Friday renewed calls to protect migrants following the death of at least 40 Haitians in a boat fire in the Atlantic Ocean.
The New York Timesreported that over 80 people were packed into the vessel when it caught fire off the coast of Cap-Haïtien en route to the Turks and Caicos Islands.
The United Nations' International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that 41 migrants were rescued by the Haitian Coast Guard, with 11 of the survivors including burn victims rushed to the nearest hospital.
"This devastating event highlights the risks faced by children, women, and men migrating through irregular routes, demonstrating the crucial need for safe and legal pathways for migration," said Grégoire Goodstein, IOM's chief of mission for Haiti. "Haiti's socio-economic situation is in agony. The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more."
Haiti is enduring a humanitarian and security crisis in which over 1,000 people have been killed, wounded, or abducted by members of gangs that control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Hundreds of Kenyan police officers have been deployed to Haiti as part of a multinational force tasked with restoring order.
According to IOM:
The lack of economic opportunities, a collapsing health system, school closures, and the absence of prospects are pushing many to consider migration as the only way to survive... IOM research found that 84% of migrants returned had left to seek job opportunities abroad. For the vast majority of Haitians, regular migration is an extremely challenging journey to consider, let alone pursue, leaving many seeing irregular migration as their only option, a particularly life-threatening one in most instances.
IOM said the Haitian Coast Guard "has observed an increase in the number of attempts and departures by boat" in recent months.
"Coast guards from countries in the region, including the United States, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and Jamaica have also reported a growing number of boats originating from Haiti being intercepted at sea," the group said. "More than 86,000 migrants have been forcibly returned to Haiti by neighboring countries this year. In March, despite a surge in violence and the closure of airports throughout the country, forced returns increased by 46%, reaching 13,000 forced returns in March alone."
Amid pressure from hundreds of advocacy groups—and alleged abuse of Haitian migrants by U.S. border authorities—the Biden administration in 2022 extended deportation protections, known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), for more than 100,000 Haitians already in the United States through this August 3. This marked a departure from the administration's earlier mass deportation of Haitian asylum-seekers.
Last month, the administration further extended TPS eligibility for over 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. for an additional 18 months, a move hailed by migrant rights advocates.
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