GREENHOUSE GASES EMISSION BASELINE SCENARIO FOR SHEEP SECTOR AT TERRITORIAL SCALE : A SARDINIA CASE STUDY

The main objective of this thesis was to estimate a new emission baseline for Sardinia dairy sheep sector using 2017 production data. The baseline scenario was aligned with the main goals of SheepToShip LIFE project to define the most effective action, viable strategies of GHG mitigation at farm and processing plant level and then plan future policy regulation of the regional government to reduce the total emission amounts by 20% in the next 10 years. For the last few decades, agriculture accounted for 10-12% of total anthropogenic GHG emission of which 14.5% was contributed from livestock sector. Small ruminants farming turned out to be an important factor to have emitted 6.5% of the GHG sector’s emission and the emission intensity of sheep products usually reaches higher values than cow and goat. Moreover, sheep equals to 60% of the world ruminant population and is expected to increase which causes larger negative impact to the atmosphere. Therefore, within the Mediterranean area, Sardinia region (Italy) with a distribution of 14000 farms, production systems and stocking rates despite small surface was targeted as the best context for demonstrative actions of GHG emission mitigation on dairy sheep sector throughout the project. Estimated baseline was finalized to calculate a proposed value and 43.2ktons showed as an amount of CO2-eq emissions that must be cut down per year to achieve the project goal of reducing GHG emission by 20% in 10 years. The whole dairy sheep supply chain’s cumulative emission in Sardinia was 2159ktons of CO2 equivalent with attribution to 80% and 20% for milk and meat, respectively. Generally, new baseline scenario was carried out following LCA methodology and covered emissions from “cradle to dairy plant gate” accounting for 3 million sheep heads and 286 million litres of produced milk with an average emission intensity of 4.8kg of CO2 equivalent per litre of milk. Similar to cattle, small ruminants’ milk and meat production emission was calculated from the two main sources namely enteric CH4, N2O, feed fertilizers, manure management and other emissions to the farm gate. Processing plant was considered due to its creation for 12% of total LCA emissions. Then, each of emission amount computed from cradle to farm gate and from the farm gate to dairy plant was combined to establish the total value of emission