La base de données ELFE : vers une meilleure connaissance des émissions gazeuses liées à l’élevage

National audienceThe increasing demand for animal products is a major challenge for the livestock sector that must reduce its environmental impacts and ensure its sustainability. This sector has been identified as an important contributor to polluting gas emissions. Improving the knowledge on the origin and the magnitude of air pollutants and greenhouse gases emissions from livestock sector is essential to address climate change and to contribute to improve air quality with the evolution of breeding practices (feeding strategy, manure management, etc.). A consortium involving research and extension services partners was created to build a database called ELFE (ELevages et Facteurs d’Emission) with international data from literature references focusing on emissions of ammonia, greenhouse gases, particles and odors on the different steps of manure management of cattle, pig and poultry productions systems and their associated key variables. Around 350 publications (among 1 000 publications collected) are integrated into the database and provide more than 5 200 emission values. The ELFE database allows calculating average of emission and their standard deviation taking into account the diversity of livestock systems. These data can be used to provide emission factor for national inventories for specific livestock systems and also, to evaluate practices on gas emissions mitigation. This database can also be used to analyze the influence of key variables on the emission factor variability using multicriteria assessment (climate, building type, etc.). Moreover, this database propose a classification of emission factor into three classes according to the degree on which information about their most influential key variables was complete (>50 % ; 30-50 % ; 50 % ; 30-50 % ;