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Assessing the impact of Climate Change on livestock

CLIMATE CHANGE, it appears, is an equal opportunity stressor – for humans and animals alike.

This is reflected in research findings from the study titled Characterising heat stress on livestock using the temperature humidity index – prospects for a warmer Caribbean.

The 2018 study, which is the work of Cicero Lallo, Dr Tannecia Stephenson and Dr Dale Rankine, among others, reveals that four types of livestock in Jamaica are already betraying signs of heat stress.

And this is even as the Caribbean has seen an increase in the number of warm days, warm nights and extreme high temperatures, together with a decrease in cool days, cool nights and extreme low temperatures.

“The future Caribbean climate is expected to produce steadily increasing heat stress for animals, which would threaten livestock productivity,” said the team of researchers who included Professor Michael Taylor and Jayaka Campbell, both of The University of the West Indies.

“For broilers and ruminants, at 1.5 degrees Celsius, every month can be categorised as very severe, in comparison to the present day, where winter months fall below this threshold. For layers, seven months of the year are projected to fall in the two highest stress categories for the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming target … the threats further intensify for successively higher global warming targets,” they added.

The Caribbean researchers and their colleagues from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, have warned of the need for prompt, significantly scaled-up and sustained actions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, given the far-reaching, negative implications for life as it is currently known.

 

The research paper referenced in the article is Characterizing heat stress on livestock using the temperature humidity index (THI)—prospects for a warmer Caribbean. It was co-authored by Cicero H. O. Lallo, Jane Cohen, Dale Rankine, Michael Taylor, Jayaka Campbell & Tannecia Stephenson, and published in Regional Environmental Change  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10113-018-1359-x.

 

For more on the research project: https://www.mona.uwi.edu/fst/fst-science-and-industry-–-cows-climate

 

See full article below.

Published on 16 Jan, 2020

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