By patricia.ngevao@awokonewspaper.sl
Freetown, SIERRA LEONE – From a narrow clearing along Barracks Old Road in the east end of Freetown, 57-year-old Alhaji Sorie Conteh watches his cattle with a quiet sense of duty. Over 25 cows shift lazily in the humid morning air as they chew on bundles of grass his boys hauled in from the outskirts of the city.
“We feed them what we can find,” he says, adjusting his cap. “Every day, the boys go out looking for grass. It’s not easy, but these cows, this is what we rely on.”
While Conteh tends to his cattle with care, like most herders in Sierra Leone’s livestock urban fringes, he has no idea that each belch and heap of dung from his animals releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.
“Methane?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Is that the same gas they put in those cooking tanks?”
Sierra Leone may not rank among the world’s top agricultural emitters, but for a country heavily reliant on farming, the climate stakes are intensifying. Nearly two-thirds of the population is engaged in agriculture, and as both subsistence and commercial farming expand to meet rising food demands, emissions from livestock, rice cultivation, fertilizer use, and land-use changes are becoming increasingly significant though they remain largely unaddressed in national conversations.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “agriculture is the backbone of Sierra Leone’s economy, employing about 60–70 percent of the labour force and contributing significantly to GDP and food security.” Yet the environmental costs of this dependence are often overlooked in climate policy and public discourse.
While Sierra Leone is not considered a livestock powerhouse, cattle rearing remains deeply rooted in the rural economies of districts like Bo, Makeni, Koinadugu, Kabala, and Falaba. In these areas, livestock is not just a source of food, but a form of wealth, livelihood, and resilience. Quietly, the sector is growing, bringing with it an under recognized contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet what’s often missing from the public conversation is a critical fact: livestock is a major contributor to methane emissions. Globally, the livestock sector accounts for approximately 14.5% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2023 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, with a significant share of that coming from cattle and goats through enteric fermentation and manure.
In Sierra Leone, however, this link between livestock and emissions is rarely acknowledged and almost never explained to the herders and farmers who are most directly involved.
“We have started to talk about climate change,” says Joseph R. Sesay, a livestock officer in Falaba. “We discuss deforestation, floods, and the dry season getting longer. But methane from cows? No, that’s new to us.”
“There are no emissions calculators in the villages. No posters warning of cow gas. No extension officer has held a workshop about how the animals they help people raise are part of a planetary puzzle involving rising temperatures, unpredictable rains, and bushfires,” he added.
Instead, cattle are seen only as wealth. A family with 50 to 80 cows is viewed as secure, even lucky. “They help in bad times,” Sesay says. “If someone falls sick, or school fees come, the owners sell one. Without them, they’d be nowhere.”
But that dependency masks a growing issue. As Sierra Leone slowly urbanizes and demand for beef increases, the number of livestock is expected to rise. And so too will the methane.
“We are not saying people should stop rearing cattle,” says Rosaline Fatmata Mansaray, a local environmentalist in Makeni. “But we need to rethink how. There are methods to reduce emissions, better feeding, improved manure management but how can we do that if nobody knows the emissions exist?”
Even in Freetown, climate experts admit the lack of research, funding, and awareness around livestock-related emissions. “We are still at the stage of fighting deforestation and coastal erosion,” one government official told Awoko anonymously. “Cows burping isn’t seen as urgent. But maybe it should be.”
That gap is felt most in places like Makeni, where herders now face hotter dry seasons, reduced grazing land, and longer walks for water. What many interpret as punishment from the heavens is, in fact, the same climate their cows are silently helping to warm.
The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, established in November 2019, is tasked with developing legal and policy frameworks to build environmental resilience. Its mandate includes addressing climate change, managing natural resources like forests and wetlands, and promoting sustainable development. Yet so far, a national strategy for tackling livestock emissions in practice has yet to emerge.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has acknowledged the issue in official policy documents. Tamba Nyaka, Director of Climate Change at the EPA, confirmed that livestock, especially cattle, are a significant source of methane emissions in Sierra Leone. “Cattle release methane in two forms: through their droppings and through belching,” Nyanga explains.
He adds “In their stomachs, gas is produced from digesting grass, and when they release waste, it continues to emit methane, noting that these concerns are outlined in Sierra Leone’s National Climate Change Policy and its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), which commit the country to promoting climate-smart agriculture and better waste management practices.
Despite these policy acknowledgements, implementation lags far behind. Funding and research for livestock-related climate mitigation are limited, and public education is almost nonexistent. “We don’t want to create panic,” says Ibrahim Bakarr PhD, a senior lecturer and researcher at Njala University. “But people must be empowered to understand their role and what can be done to make it better. It’s not about stopping cattle rearing. It’s about smarter ways to do it.”
Notably, the FAO (2013) report recommends interventions that improve production efficiency at both animal and herd levels. These include improved feeding practices, better animal health and breeding, enhanced manure management, and sourcing low-emission inputs. Technologies like feed additives, vaccines, and genetic improvements also show promise but require further development.
The report underscores that mitigation potential exists across all species, systems, and regions, particularly in low-productivity ruminant systems in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
In higher-income regions, where production is more efficient, small improvements in emission intensity can still yield significant reductions. However, realizing this potential demands enabling environments supportive policies, institutional frameworks, awareness campaigns, financial incentives, and investment in research and development.
The FAO stresses the need for global, multi-stakeholder collaboration to ensure cost-effective, equitable, and scalable solutions, especially in least affluent countries where emissions reductions must align with development and food security goals.
For now, herders like Conteh remain unaware that their traditional way of life contributes to the very climate shifts reshaping it. As he prepares to attend to a customer, he pauses to look up at the gray sky. “The rains are coming now,” he says. “But they’re different from before.” He knows his cows are vital to his family’s survival but no one has explained that they may also be part of the problem.
Until that conversation begins in earnest, thousands of Sierra Leoneans will continue living as they always have, unaware of the changing world beneath their feet.
Tamba Nyaka, Director of Climate Change at the EPA
