Climate Change Impacts On Livestock And Adaptation Strategies To Sustain Livestock Production In The Ecologically Fragile Areas Of Qinghai Province, China

Climate change impacts on livestock and adaptation strategies to sustain livestock production have become the focus of the governments and the scientific communities, especially for ecologically fragile areas. Given the unique geographical environment and climatic conditions, Qinghai province is one of the most representative regions selected for conducting the research on climate change impacts and adaptation strategies. For the significant position of Qinghai Province on the livestock production at national, East Asian and even global scale, the thesis concentrating on the observations and modelling analyses on climate change impacts on livestock with an aim to offer decision support information for sustain livestock production by mitigating and adapting climate changes in Qinghai Province.The thesis based on the herdsman’s survey data of ecologically fragile areas in Qinghai Province where located in West China, under the background of effect of climate change to the income of herdsman, with the empirical analysis of adaptation technology measures, engineering measures, management measures and policy measures impact on herdsman income. Using positive mathematical programming model research of animal husbandry production mechanism of climate change adaptation measures and ways, and analyzes the strength of the influence of adaptation measures under different hierarchical levels, to reduce the loss of livestock production in Qinghai Province, and increasing the income of the herdsmen, the multiple targets to slow climate change put forward scientific and rational policy suggestions and adaptation measures. At the same time, in order to improving ecosystem services of ecological fragile areas under the premise of scheduled the priority sequence of adaptation measures, extract suitable for the ecological fragile district economic development measures and suggestions to protect the grassland resource. The optimization of the ecological environment and social economy sustainable development provides a good decision-making reference and also laid a good foundation for herders to tackle adaptation measures to climate change more favorable in the ecological fragile areas adaptation measures. The main conclusions are as follows.(1) The results of statistical and spatial analysis of the meteorological data indicate the spatio-temporal difference of temperature and precipitation changes. In spatial scale, the distribution of temperature and precipitation showed a degressive trend from the low altitude and latitude southeastern region to the high latitude and latitude areas. In general, the climate change in Qinghai Province during the past thirty years presented a "wet and warm" trend.(2)The number of livestocks in Qinghai Province appeared to exihibit the tendency of evidently fluctuating decrease between1990and2010. The total output of livestock meat presents a relatively slow growth trend. Correspondingly, the livestock production maintains a stable but slacked growth, and the population and GDP in Qinghai Province has shown a trend of obvious exponential growth, and its social economy has being in a stage of rapid development. From the point of sub-period analysis, during the period1995-2000, the growth rate of population and GDP is lower than other periods’. At the same time, the population and GDP in Qinghai Province has obvious spatial difference, namely different county shows different growth rate.(3)Through the method of multi-level modeling (MLM), The temperature of Qinghai Province presented an obvious warming trend in the past20years. The annual percipitation of Qinghai Province had very obvious inter-annual variation. The variation characteristics of the climate factors (temperature, precipitation) could lead to regional warming and frequent variation between dry and wet climate. It was evident that the grasslands in most part of the province were significantly influenced by climatic factors such as temperature and precipitation for the past30years. When the effect of climate change was much greater in the areas exhibiting vigorous vegetation growth. The impact of climate factors on livestock production dominates, changes in climate factors directly lead to loss of livestock, as well as climatic factors affecting livestock production through the indirect social and economic systems; and local socio-economic and natural conditions in addition to climatic factors also significantly affect changes in livestock production. The fast development of social economy has obviously suppressed the stability and sustainability of grassland ecosystem, while the improvement of climate and natural conditions are conducive to the growth and development of grass. There are significant positive correlation between the income of pastoralists and the growth condition of grassland and the natural conditions, and negative correlation between the income of pastoralists and the socio-economic factors.(4)Through the method of positive mathematical programming (PMP) model, under the premise that the variation of temperature increases, the manual maintainance of grasslands has the most significant effects on the increase of income of herdsmen. Second, under the premise that the variation of precipitation increases, the manual maintainance of grasslands has positive impacts on the livestock number and income from animal husbandry in the pastures of different scales. The snow disaster early warning mechanism for the development of the pasture and increasing herdsmen’s income has a significant role. Under the condition of high effect of precipitation rate, pasture and artificial maintenance measures for different size and the number of livestock husbandry income have positive influence, in the nomads pasture scale phase at the same time, the smaller the herdsmen pasture, quantity fluctuation rate and livestock husbandry income changes have greater impact. Policy-related subsidies under the action of herdsmen pasture size was positively correlation with net income of the herdsmen, the larger herdsmen’s pasture, the net income of the more; Among them, the herdsmen per capita income is lower, the income rate is bigger. It is urgent to increase the income of local herdsmen and subsequently improve their living standard under the premise of not damaging the fragile ecological environment, and promote the economic development level with the sustainable development strategy. It is necessary to make more efforts to monitor the pastures. More efforts should be made to realize the following two conversions, i.e., to help the herdsmen convert the perception of the impacts of grassland degradation into practice, and convert the herdsman families as the simple production unit into the unified unit of both livestock production and ecological protection.