One way by which small scale livestock herders can adapt to a changing climate is by shifting focus to more adapted, drought tolerant and native fodder species. An example we identified can be read here http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/10220119.2014.942368
Some of our biggest opportunities for both reducing and coping with climate change lie among the one billion poor people raising farm animals across the developing world (ILRI poster).
Systems analyst and livestock-climate change scientist Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) says livestock systems in developing countries remain understudied. This even though livestock keepers, whether pastoral herders or ‘mixed’ crop-livestock farmers, are essential to development destinies in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the world’s poverty and hunger remain the most concentrated.
The good news is that there are many ways small-scale livestock keepers can adapt to the changing climate, e.g. by making their production more efficient—a triple win for raising household incomes, reducing greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product and coping with variable climates.
The bad news is we still haven’t reliably reckoned the costs and benefits of many livestock adaptation options in developing countries.
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