The Forgotten Sector: Establishing the Need for Stronger Regulation of Livestock Emissions in the European Union – An Emergency Law Perspective

The current EU emission mitigation framework manifests the narrative that CO2 emissions are the predominant source of anthropogenic climate change. However, this approach fails to acknowledge the intense impact that non-CO2 GHG, primarily from animal agriculture, has on global warming. This paper establishes the near exemption that livestock emissions are given within EU climate change policies, leading to inherently inadequate mitigation efforts. Although climate emergency declarations are continuously cited as efficient tools to break governments’ complacency regarding climate policy through normative force, an investigation of the European Parliament’s Climate Emergency Declaration suggests that the EU failed to exploit the potential of its climate emergency declaration as it maintains livestock emissions’ free pass within its current emission mitigation framework. The paper proposes sectoral emergency intervention as an alternative to the current climate emergency declaration to incite necessary climate action in the livestock sector.