Fostering animal breeding and genetics for climate change adaptation and mitigation, improved robustness and resilience

Proposals will deliver:
• Enhanced sustainable and environmentally responsible land-based livestock production systems in line with the EU Green Deal, methane strategy, organic production action plan and CAP objectives.
• Cost-effective livestock emission mitigation solutions and improved quantification of their impacts for EU Member States and Associated Countries.
• Empowered farmers and sector actors to manage efficient, profitable, low-greenhouse-gas livestock systems that contribute to climate neutrality and resilience.
• Deeper understanding among breeders, farmers and advisors of management–genotype–environment interactions, enabling sustainable livestock population management and efficient animal–feed recoupling from farm to landscape scale.
• Widely disseminated genomic and phenotypic trait information for breeding animals with lower greenhouse gas emissions and enhanced climate adaptation.
• Clear insight into the role of genetics in livestock sustainability and production efficiency, including trade-offs among breeding objectives, with identified pathways and solutions to adoption obstacles.
• Scientific evidence and policy recommendations to support the development, implementation and evaluation of EU policies and strategies (e.g. CAP, methane strategy) for sustainable livestock production.

Proposals must:
• Focus on genetic and breeding improvements to enhance livestock production efficiency, sustainability, adaptation to environmental stressors and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Cover multiple terrestrial livestock farming systems or approaches, explicitly including at least one organic farming system.
• Use easily accessible, low-cost, scalable protocols for on-farm measurement and selection of existing and new traits with low environmental and climate footprints.
• Incorporate adaptation and mitigation objectives into breeding goals and sustainable management decisions, balancing methane reduction with animal health, welfare and genetic diversity.
• Address all specified activities (trait identification, tool development, TRL 7 demonstration, cost-effectiveness analysis).
• Apply the Horizon Europe multi-actor approach and engage all relevant stakeholder groups.
• Allocate staff and resources for a coordination task to collaborate with other projects under this topic, ensuring coherence with past and ongoing EU research.
• Engage with relevant European and international organisations (e.g. FAO LEAP, GRA) and, where appropriate, include international partners.