Towards the environmental labelling of animal products

The French association of animal production (AFZ) organized three webinars in order to take stock of knowledge about the environmental assessment of animal products, in the perspective of the upcoming environmental labelling of food items. This article summarizes the nine presentations and the debates during these webinars. The first webinar considered the issue of the environmental assessment of livestock systems and their products, within the broader framework of sustainable human food as defined by the FAO, thus emphasizing that the solutions for improvement are diverse depending on the country, as well in terms of farming systems as in evolution of production and consumption. The second webinar was devoted to the methods and data available for the environmental assessment of livestock systems and animal products. The third webinar focused on the environmental labelling of food items with a first contribution on the approaches to identify more sustainable diets, followed by three presentations related to the labelling experiment conducted by the Ministry of Ecological Transition, in partnership with actors in the field. These different contributions underline the importance of the methodological achievements and the available data, even if some improvements still need to be made, in particular to better take into account the specificities of pasture-based and organic livestock farming systems. In addition, the labelling experiments confirmed consumers' interest in getting an explicit information about the environmental impact of their food.