Impact of Climate Variability on the Occurrence of Selected Cattle Diseases in Upper River Region, The Gambia

Abstract

The study was conducted in Upper River Region, The Gambia with the aim of determining the relationship between variabilities in climate parameters and the occurrences of common cattle diseases. The study was to establish the relationship between climate variability and the occurrence of common cattle diseases, to compare by gender cattle farmers’ perception and understanding of climate variability, its impact and their coping strategies and also to determine the degree of climate variability in the study area. One hundred and eighty-seven (187) structured questionnaire adopting face-to-face individual respondents interviewed and six focused group discussions (3 for men and 3 for women) were separately held in three of the seven districts of the Region. In the focused group discussions, participatory rural appraisal tools including pairwise ranking and matrix scoring were employed. Spearman correlation and regression analysis was conducted to assess the relationship between climate variables and the selected diseases. To find out the difference between female and male cattle owners, frequency analysis and Pearson chi-square tests were done. Mann-Kendall and standardized anomaly tests were also conducted to assess the nature of climate variability. Findings showed that the occurrence of each of the common cattle diseases is correlated to at least one of the climate variables, temperature being the most influential. For instance, monthly occurrence of reproductive and urinary tract infections was positively associated with minimum temperature (r = 0.177, p = 0.027), humidity (r = 0.174, p = 0.038), rainfall (r = 0.265, p < 0.001) and wind speed (r = 0.166, p = 0.038) in the Basse area at 0.05 alpha value. The study further revealed that there was no significant difference between gender and perceptions on questions relating to temperature, wind speed and rainfall trends. However, there were significant gender effects on most of the questions relating to impact and adaptation to climate variability. Only rainfall was found to be following a monotonic trend, however, the standardized anomaly demonstrated both monthly and yearly variations in all climate variables. Based on these observations, the following conclusions were made; a) the occurrence of common cattle diseases was influenced by climate variability, b) there were lots of gender differences in perception, impact and adaptation to climate variability and c) Climate variability does exist and its extent was great for many to detect, though the causes were not well understood by most cattle owners, particularly women cattle owners. In view of these, it was recommended that cattle management practices be improved to minimise the impact of climate variability on cattle health. Moreover, interventions to assist cattle owners cope with climate variability should be gender sensitive.