Translations:Effects of climate change on livestock/39/en

A follow-up paper considered the impact of several adaptation measures. Installing a ground-coupled heat exchanger was the most effective intervention at addressing heat stress, reducing it by 90 to 100%. Two other cooling systems also showed substantial effectiveness: evaporative cooler pads made of wet cellulose reduced heat stress by 74 to 92%, although they also risked increasing wet bulb temperature stress as they necessarily moistened the air. Combining such pads with regenerative heat exchangers eliminated this issue, but also increased costs and reduced the effectiveness of the system to between 61% and 86%. All three interventions were considered capable of completely buffering the future impact of climate change on heat stress over at least the next three decades, but installing them requires substantial start-up investments, and their impact on commercial viability of the facilities is unclear. Other interventions were considered unable to fully buffer the impact of warming, but they were also cheaper and simpler by comparison. They include doubling the ventilation capacity, and having the pigs rest during the day while feeding them at night when it is cooler: such a 10-hour shift would require that the facility only uses artificial light and switch to predominantly night shift work. Similarly, stocking fewer pigs per facility is the absolute simplest intervention, yet it has the lowest effectiveness, and necessarily reduces profitability.