Ecosystem services assessment in livestock agroecosystems
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This document highlights the crucial role of livestock agroecosystems in rural development, landscape management, and food security, while noting that public debate often focuses mainly on negative aspects such as environmental impacts, human health, and animal welfare. These concerns tend to overshadow the multiple benefits livestock systems provide to society.Framed through the concept of ecosystem services, the guide outlines four categories of benefits that livestock agroecosystems deliver to human well-being:- Provisioning services, including the production of food and fibre.- Regulating services, such as climate and air quality control, water management, disease regulation, pollination, and natural hazard mitigation.- Cultural services, encompassing recreational, aesthetic, educational, social, and spiritual values.- Supporting services, including soil formation, photosynthesis, and water and nutrient cycling.Achieving truly sustainable livestock production requires recognizing and systematically assessing these services. To support this, the guide calls for a harmonized international approach. It recommends the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) as a standardized framework for identifying and categorizing ecosystem services, and proposes a five-step roadmap to ensure robust and transparent valuation processes that generate reliable evidence for policy and management.Integrating biophysical, socio-cultural, economic, and modelling valuation methods, the guide serves as a first step toward consistent international guidance. It provides both conceptual foundations and practical approaches to better assess, promote, and sustain the contributions of livestock agroecosystems to global sustainability.