ANNOUNCEMENTS
The global demand for cattle and the products given by them is always required at a very large scale and this demand is further going to increase in the future as well. At the very same time climate change is also happening which poses a significant menace to the cattle as it adversely affects the production of feed crop, availability of water, livestock diseases and biodiversity. In Indian state of Maharashtra, cattle form a considerable portion of livestock where it always occupies more than 30% of the total livestock. Thus, it becomes imperative to know the vulnerability status of cattle, if they are under any kind of stress or if any progress has to be made to stabilize their present condition. Using the IPCC framework, the study focuses on finding out the climatic, bio-physical and social factors that affects cattle the most and are indicators of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of cattle. The study was carried out using dataset of temperature, rainfall, humidity, number of veterinary doctors, annual crop residue and cattle population for the duration of 1997-2012 at the five-year interval. The spatio-temporal variation in these indicators suggests that the climate change is happening rapidly which also affects other bio-physical factors. The climate vulnerability index for cattle at district level for each year was calculated by taking weighted linear combination of all the indicators in the IPCC framework. The weight for each of the indicator was calculated using Analytical Hierarchical Process which were integrated into GIS platform to understand the spatial variability of the vulnerability of cattle population using those identified factors at the district level. Five vulnerability categories namely: Very Low, Low, Medium, High and Very High vulnerability were made and the results showed that from the year 1997 to 2012 the western and north-eastern region always had the highest and lowest vulnerability levels to the cattle. The area under low and very low vulnerability category also increased within a span of 15 years. Around 25% of the area was under these two categories in the year 1997 which rose about two time and in the year 2012 about 60% of the area was under very low and low vulnerability. This is a positive indicator that vulnerability of cattle in the district is reducing with the passage of time. This index based approach helps us to easily understand how much stressed the cattle are in different parts of Maharashtra. Also this study is one of its kind that exhibits the vulnerability level of cattle which would help the planners and agencies such as veterinary, agricultural, environmental agencies to adapt to the policies and strategies that would lower the risk and threats that cattle poses.
