Case Study: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada achieves streamlined, transparent livestock methane-emissions modeling and robust uncertainty analysis with Lumina Decision Systems' Analytica

Are Cows Worse than Cars for Greenhouse Gas?

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada faced a growing challenge: their Excel-based inventory for livestock methane emissions (required by the Kyoto Protocol and IPCC methods) had become complex and opaque, and they needed probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Dr. Julian Hutchinson selected Analytica from Lumina Decision Systems to replace and clarify the spreadsheet model and support IPCC-recommended uncertainty methods.

Lumina Decision Systems translated the spreadsheet into Analytica, building a model covering 28 animal types across 10 provinces (IPCC Tier 2 for cattle, Tier 1 for others), adding multiyear capability, Monte Carlo uncertainty and sensitivity analysis, and live OLE links to spreadsheet inputs. The rewrite took 3 person-days and reduced file size from 1.60 MB to 48 KB (≈34× smaller), producing a much clearer, easier-to-track model that identified the most influential input uncertainties and increased confidence in the emissions estimates.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Julian Hutchinson

Research Associate