The WaterBlog

Livestock and climate change: resilient cattle sheds

By Ashfaque Ahmed Soomro and Frank van Steenbergen   Climate change has a major impact on human, but the impact on livestock is nothing less.  An example are the 2022 floods in Pakistan: here more than one million animals lost their lives: especially of the larger animals, that could not be moved to safe grounds. It left many rural households without part of the sustenance of the family. Besides the risk of being stranded during a flood, livestock is affected in many other dimensions of cropping in spate areas, livestock is a major livelihood resource, farmers are dependent on. Climate resilient livestock management has always been a challenge for the farmers, particularly in poverty stricken and climatically sensitive areas, like the spate irrigated areas, where heavy floods sometime cause troubles. Global warming results varied intensity of climate events which leads to warmer and more intense summers. This substantially impacts on livestock productivity and therefore declined animal products such as milk… Continued