The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB) has announced its plan and commitment to sustainability goals by 2030.
Focused on three areas — climate, land use, and animal health and welfare — the plan outlines the roundtable’s “commitments to advance and improve the sustainability of the global beef value chain.”
Specifically, GRSB aims to globally reduce by 30 per cent the net global warming impact of each unit of beef by 2030, on a pathway to climate neutrality. This will be achieved through emissions reduction and carbon sequestration of forage cover and grasslands. Roundtable members are also committed to looking beyond how to manage for carbon sequestration and focus on effective measurement on an on-going basis.
For land use, GRSB and its members will ensure the beef value chain is a net positive contributor to nature by 2030. This means that GRSB will work with national and regional roundtables to establish measurement metrics to effectively measure, track, report, and verify progress. GRSB members will finance, source, develop, support, and share practices throughout the entire value chain that are designed to “sustain and restore grazing lands, enhance resilience, conserve forests, grasslands, and native vegetation, increase biodiversity, and help reverse ecological decline.”
This also includes eliminating illegal deforestation and illegal land conversion as a priority, and includes a commitment to beef producer financial support to achieve this goal.
In the area of animal health and welfare, GRSB members will focus their efforts on continuing to improve the quality of life for cattle, achieved through increased adoption of best practices in disease prevention, treatment measures, cattle handling, and appropriate genetics.
Roundtable members will increase training opportunities for ranchers and beef producers for practices that ensure comfort, allow animals to express normal patterns of behaviour, and ensure pain mitigation where required.
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