Towards a Climate Change database for livestock adaptation and mitigation in Kenya

The Kenyan rural communities face a myriad of challenges including poverty, food security, scarcity of water, and challenges emerging due to global warming and climate change. Notable direct effects include higher temperatures and drastic changes in rainfall patterns, consequently aberrant transmission models, and increased spread of existing vector-borne diseases, emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases. Major challenges for adaptation interventions in Kenya include insufficient local level historic and future climate change information. Given the complexity of livestock and crop-livestock systems, a mix of technological, policy and institutional innovations will inevitably be required. Here we propose approaches that can be used to develop reliable climate databases and to incorporate these data into predictive risk models. We hypothesize that techniques should be further refined to produce detailed relational databases. The proposed climate system models are to provide insights on climate variability and impacts on livestock, they are designated as problem-solving tools that allow users to process and analyse climate data in a multidisciplinary context. They should be ideal for storage, archiving, display, analysis and interpretation of the localised impacts, and the importance of identifying appropriate options that can help livestock keepers adapt to climate change. However we reckon the overarching issues of shrinking government budgets, curriculum suitability and need for collaboration to expand our knowledge of how climate change and increasing climate variability will affect livestock systems and the livelihoods of the people who depend on them.