Climate stress and its impact on livestock health, farming livelihoods and antibiotic use in Karnataka, India
Authors: Eskdale Adam , Tholth Mahmoud El , Paul Jonathan D. , Desphande Jayant , Cole Jennifer 
Published: June 2022

Understanding the impact of climate change on livestock health is critical to safeguarding global food supplies and economies. Informed by ethnographic research with Indian farmers, veterinarians, and poultry industry representatives, we evidence that both precipitation and vapour pressure are key climate variables that relate to outbreaks of haemorrhagic septicaemia (HS), anthrax (AX), and black quarter (BQ) across the Indian state of Karnataka. We also identify temperature and maximum temperature to be negatively correlated with the same diseases, indicating that a cooling (but still hot) climate with wetter, humid conditions is a prime risk factor for future outbreaks. Principal component analyses have revealed the SW India monsoon and winter periods to be the most strongly correlated with HS, AX and BQ outbreaks. We identify vapour pressure, a proxy for humidity, as having a positive relationship with these specific livestock diseases. The negative relationship between temperature and these diseases, combined with the positive correlation with rainfall and humidity, allow us to classify climate-associated risk using a combination of gridded meteorological time series and epidemiological outbreak data covering the same region and timespan of 1987–2020.

Risk maps were constructed following concerns over the growing impact of climate pressures raised by farmers during ethnographic study. Informed by their insights, we used current climate data and future climate projections as a risk classification tool to assess how disease risk varies in Karnataka in the present and possible future scenarios. Despite a relatively limited epidemiological dataset, clear relationships between precipitation, vapour pressure, and temperature with HS, AX and BQ, along with outbreak high-risk zones were defined. This methodology can be replicated to investigate other diseases (including in humans and plants) and other regions, irrespective of scale, as long as the climate and epidemiological data cover similar time periods. This evidence highlights the need for greater consideration of climate change in One Health research and policy and puts forward a case for, we argue, greater alignment between UNFCCC and One Health policy, for example, within the Tripartite Agreement (between OIE, FOA and WHO) on antimicrobial resistance as disease risk cannot be considered independent of climate change.

One Health Impact Statement

This research aims to investigate the relationship between factors related to climate (surface temperatures, rainfall, humidity) and outbreaks of livestock-related bacterial diseases. This is especially relevant to the One Health approach as it attempts to integrate findings between not only the science of disease but also the science of climate change as a driver of disease, and address problems that could arise within the public and private sectors (local farming, livestock health, government policy etc.). Providing spatial context to climate-associated disease risk across the Indian state of Karnataka will benefit local farmers that may already be, or transitioning to, more intensive livestock farming along with policy makers and private sector companies who are planning for future investments. This transdisciplinary approach springboards from ethnographic observations of famers’ lived experiences of challenges to their livelihoods and facilitates the use of climate datasets that may not have been primarily collected for or used by disease-related studies to map long-term epidemiological risk. This demonstrates the pragmatic impact that such transdisciplinary projects can have by providing interpretations of observed risks to animal health (highlighted by social scientists during engagement with practitioner communities) that Earth Scientists were then able to quantify, proving links that would be otherwise not have been evidenced. Using disease data sourced from local institutions, including Government of India facilitates as well academic research laboratories, can plan the application of pragmatic solutions to local farmers who are primarily impacted by the findings of the research.