The final event will be held on June 10th with a Zoom conference of the Sheep To Ship LIFE project. The event, which will start at 09.30, is totally free and a simultaneous translation service will be provided in Italian and English.
Press release
The SheepToShip Life project comes to an end after five years of work. The precise and ambitious goal has been achieved: to demonstrate how dairy sheep farming can be more sustainable from a climate and environmental point of view and, at the same time, more efficient and profitable. In spite of the collective imagination linked to idyllic landscapes made of sheep, green pastures and blue skies, the project has quantified how, in reality, the sheep dairy sector of Sardinia, with about 3 million head and over 10 thousand active companies , contributes over 5% of the greenhouse gas emissions of Italian agriculture. On the other hand, the margins for improvement highlighted by the project are wide, thanks to specific actions to mitigate climate change, especially if accompanied by the enhancement of the important eco-systemic services offered, to which Sardinian sheep farms are structurally suited. It starts with a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in ten years and, on a regional scale, systematizing the eco-innovation strategies set out in the Environmental Action Plan developed by SheepToShip LIFE, the climate neutrality of sheep systems Sardinia could be easily reached by 2050. The project, carried out in the period 2016-2021 thanks to funding from the “Climate Action” sub-program of the LIFE program “Environment and climate change” of the European Union, was coordinated by the CNR IBE of Sassari and saw the participation of the University of Sassari, with the Departments of Agriculture and Economic and Business Sciences, the Agris and Laore regional agencies, and the Department of Environmental Defense of the Sardinia Region. The reflections on the legacy that the project leaves to the Sardinia Region and the Mediterranean sheep sector, more generally, will be discussed next Thursday 10 June in the final event entitled “Sheep may safely graze, and they can help us in the challenge of climatic change”. The conference, of a popular nature, will be accessible online at the link https://zoom.us/j/97241413137 and will allow to deepen, with both national and European industry experts, the role and opportunities that the sheep sector can play and seize in the framework of the next National Strategic Program for Rural Development and within the European strategy “From Farm to Fork” .