“Is improving sheep farms’ carbon footprint (CF) positively linked to the overall farm sustainability?” One of the objectives of the LIFE Green Sheep project is to monitor sheep farms across five countries to evaluate their CF and sustainability indicators (environment, economics, social). The project involves 1,284 demonstrative farms, which undergo an initial environmental and sustainability evaluation, and 260 innovative farms, which have more in-depth evaluations and monitoring. For the sustainability evaluation, each pillar (ie environment) is defined by several issues (ie climatic impact), which are then translated into indicators (ie GHG emission). Local references are used to rank each indicator on a scale of one to five. No weighting is applied to the indicators. The sustainability grid includes 18 indicators for demonstrative farms and 33 for innovative farms. As the results are divergent, the focus is on innovative farms. The best farms for CF results (called ‘top’) are those with a rank of five for GHG emissions per functional unit (FU). For dairy farms, top farms have the same rank on the environmental and social pillars as the average, while their economic rank is lower. An assessment of the ranking details of parameters within each pillar shows that the main negative differences are in farm efficiency and contribution to employment. For meat farms, top farms have a higher social rank than the average, while the opposite is true for the other two pillars. For the social pillar, top farms have a better ranking on services to the territory and production quality parameters. Conversely, they have a lower ranking on the two economic parameters, and in the environmental pillar, two out of five parameters are negative. Preliminary results show that sustainability is a multi-factor evaluation, and even within the environmental pillar, GHG is only one of the issues.
