Abstract
Climate change is a global issue widely recognized by the European population. Researchers generally acknowledge that the agricultural sector contributes significantly to climate change. The livestock sector produces about two thirds of the total Greenhouse gasses emissions (GHG) generated from all farm production processes. On the other hand, climate change affects agriculture and zootechny in multiple ways. There is abundant literature on the measures that could be adopted by the farmers to mitigate the climate change effects and adapt their activity to the changes. Nonetheless, these studies focus predominantly on Africa and Asia, and fewer studies involve Europe and Nordic areas. This study aims at analyzing livestock holders’ perception of climate change, verifying whether and why they adopt mitigation and/or adaptation techniques, and identifying the limitations that delay the spread of these measures. For this purpose, a survey was conducted among a livestock holdings sample in Lithuania. The findings have suggested that the holders with a small number of animals, situated in the regions where livestock production is not very economically advanced, have difficulties in adopting the climate-change-related measures because they do not have sufficient funds to implement them and are not aware of the possibilities for such measures.
Highlights
Agriculture and climate change (CC) are closely interrelated considering that agriculture is one of the main contributors of CC and that agriculture is one of the sectors that are highly sensitive to CC [1]
Livestock is among the main CC contributors: in 2018, the total impact of livestock was about 3.5 billion tons CO2eq, i.e., about two thirds of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions generated by all production processes located within the farm phase [5]
The results show that farmers were generally aware of CC and its effect, in line with the results obtained by other studies [10,18,19,20,22,40]
Summary
Agriculture and climate change (CC) are closely interrelated considering that agriculture is one of the main contributors of CC and that agriculture is one of the sectors that are highly sensitive to CC [1]. One of the most common impacts is the change in the quantity and quality of croplands and pastures depending on location, livestock system, and species [1,3]. Livestock is among the main CC contributors: in 2018, the total impact of livestock was about 3.5 billion tons CO2eq, i.e., about two thirds of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions generated by all production processes located within the farm phase [5] The sector contributes both directly and indirectly to GHG emissions and influences climate through land use change, feed production, animal production, manure, processing, and transport [3]
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