The potential of improved animal welfare as an environmental impact mitigation strategy in dairy sheep farming

The urgent need to limit global warming requires all productive sectors to commit to the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the livestock sector, responsible for 14.5% of anthropogenic GHG emissions, is called upon to choose and implement appropriate mitigation solutions. Relatively few studies have quantified the effect of poor animal welfare on the environmental impact of farms. Therefore, it is difficult to hypothesise to which extent good practices of animal welfare improvement might contribute to GHG mitigation. The present work aims to quantify the GHG mitigation potential allowed by the improvement of impaired welfare scenarios in dairy sheep farms from the Mediterranean basin.