Enhancing biodiversity through livestock keeping

Extensive livestock use can enhance biodiversity and support species conservation in multiple ways. Mobile pastoral systems can create bio-corridors through transhumance routes and disperse seeds, enhancing biodiversity across landscapes, for example. Mobile livestock also create fertile hotspots across rangelands, and livestock grazing is essential in reducing fire loads in vulnerable ecosystems.

Carefully managed grazing in extensive (especially in mobile) livestock systems is essential for biodiversity conservation in many ecosystems across the world. A major priority for COP15 must be to ensure that livestock keeping is central to biodiversity conservation plans. This briefing offers eight examples of how biodiversity conservation and extensive, mobile livestock keeping go hand-in-hand.