**2. Methodological procedure**

**1. Introduction**

72 Forage Groups

Since its early origins, mankind adapts to the prevailing climatic conditions (from the arctic to the tropical rainforest) and copes fairly successfully with natural climate variability. It is very old wisdom that climate dictates farm management strategies. Fairly new, however, is the idea that agriculture, livestock husbandry, and food consumption habits are forcing supposedly the climate to change. This idea spread across the globe when thousands of media reports picked up the central message of the famous FAO report "Livestock's Long Shadow" [1], which blamed domestic livestock of causing serious environmental hazards such as climate change, through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Another FAO report [2] basically transmitted the same message, reducing, however, somewhat the livestock contribution to global GHG emissions from 18 to 14.5%. But dramatic figures of emission intensity were still maintained particularly for South American pasture-based beef production (**Figure 1**).

The worrisome messages launched by the FAO were eagerly disseminated by several environmentalist and even ecclesiastic organizations. They also triggered political action: there was a public audience in the European Parliament in November 2009 about the topic "Less Meat = Less Heat." And at the Conference of Partners in Paris COP21 in 2015, this topic was also subject in the climate negotiations. And even in scientific literature, reduction of livestock numbers and meat consumption was recommended [3]. These concerns expressed by public institutions, the media, politics, and even science evoke the question: is global climate really

at risk from livestock husbandry and cropping?

**Figure 1.** Key conclusions from Gerber et al. [2].

To answer this question, we did extensive review work, cross-checking critically coherence and (in)compatibilities between several published papers and data, and came to distinct results to what one would expect when listening to environmentalists and political climate change activists.
