Climate Change and the Livestock Sector’s Mitigation Potential: A Seized Opportunity for the International Climate Regime?

Climate change is destined to remain a central topic of the international political agenda for the decades to come. Several climate negotiations have been conducted over the last three decades, and a diversified range of climate policies has been adopted at the planetary level over this timeframe. Nevertheless, it appears to exist a particular economic sector having a great impact in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a terrific potential in terms of climate change mitigation, which has regularly been ignored by national and supranational regulation authorities: the livestock sector. Interestingly, while there is a plethora of scientific studies focusing on the necessity to mitigate livestock sector’s emissions through a reduction of animal-food consumption and production, the number of legal and political experts focusing on this issue is particularly meagre. The aim of this article is to try to fill this research gap, by looking for the instruments put at disposal by the International Climate Regime in order to induce the mitigation of livestock emissions worldwide.