Modeling livestock ecosystem services through carbon footprint

• Use of the ecosphere and technosphere concepts in ecosystem services modeling. • Two routes to assess impacts, one through a new impact category. • Soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in modeling the carbon ecosystem services category. • Characterization factor for 47 US states and one for the US Average available for use. • Average US presents a stock of until 0.0081 kg of CO 2 eq. animal year*m 2. Ruminant livestock farming plays a significant role in climate change, as it is the economic activity that emits the most methane, along with other greenhouse gases (GHG). Thus, we intend to provide a metric to verify whether a livestock system provides ecosystem services through CO 2 eq. emissions and convert the results into characterization factors (CF) for life cycle assessment (LCA). We applied the concept of technosphere and ecosphere to define natural and anthropogenic systems (grazing beef cattle) and created two approaches to evaluate impacts: 1) converting the carbon footprint into output for inventories; 2) estimating CF for a new impact category, carbon ecosystem service (CES), using soil organic carbon (SOC) as a proxy. Both approaches were tested in a case study in the American territory. There were limitations in route modeling, especially route 2, which using SOC, allowed the case study to be evaluated. Thus, the Mountains region states had positive impacts, storing more carbon than emitting it, providing “services”. The opposite was observed for the Northeast region states, which had negative impacts. Therefore, we built a concept for modeling livestock ecosystem services through the carbon footprint, and we made available 47 CF for American states and one country average.