An extensive literature survey was conducted using various search databases between 1 June and 31 August 2021. Two researchers were assigned to do the literature search and selection. Data searches used in the current paper include Google scholar, Science direct, Cab direct, Sabinet and Sematic scholar. The search was only limited to published articles conducted post year 2000 in South Africa. Only literature published in the English language was considered for the paper. The study only selected articles that covered impact of climate change on livestock production. Furthermore, literature on climate change mitigation and adaption options in rural livestock farming were also considered. The search strategy was only targeting full-text articles. A combination of various key search terms were used to gather the data. For climate change data, terms such as “weather”, “heat wave”, “drought” and “floods” were used. On the other hand, to search for livestock literature, the assigned researchers used terms such as “poultry” and “ruminants”, while impact search was conducted through key terms search “heat stress”, “forage availability”, “production”, “reproduction” and “disease outbreaks”. Initially the search resulted in one hundred and eight articles (including duplicates). However, after the inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied to these 108 articles, sixty-two articles were considered relevant to the literature synthesis in terms of context and content ( Figure 1 ).

The selected articles were uploaded on Mendeley referencing tool to reduce human error in data coding and content analysis. One of the benefits of using this referencing software is that it automatically generates the bibliographic information once imported. Microsoft Excel was used to sort and organize the data according to individual articles. The information of interest included type of the manuscript (review, experimental, or survey), year of publication, the province where the research was conducted, livestock species, etc. Data summary was transformed into quantitative measures and the results were presented in the form of tables and graphs.

Climate change impact and mitigation on livestock production has received partial research attention in the past two decades in South Africa. Publications of these works have been conducted and shared in various academic platforms in surveys (50%) and experimental investigations (33%). In comparison, the rest has been conducted through literature reviews (17%), as shown in Figure 2A . A notable difference amongst these published articles has been observed in yearly contributions since the year-2000 ( Figure 2B ). Only 4 survey articles have been published from the year 2000 to 2010. A slight increase in publication pattern for experimental investigations and literature reviews was recorded from the year-2011 to 2021, with survey articles constituting a large proportion of the publications. The type of published articles were noted to vary according to the principal author’s affiliation ( Figure 2C ). More than half of the published articles (17 surveys, 14 experiments and 4 literature reviews) have been documented using universities as a principal author’s affiliation or research station. In contrast, the rest has been published through government research institutes (11 survey articles, 8 experiments, and 2 literature reviews) and private research organizations (3 surveys, 1 literature review and 2 experiments). Overall, Figure 2 indicates that climate change research, mainly surveys carried out by research and higher education institutions, has been increasing over the past two decade. This has a bearing on the quality and utilization of the studies.

Research attention and published articles on climatic shocks to livestock production is gaining momentum in various communities of South Africa ( Figure 3A ). The analysis shows that 59% of the available literature has looked at multiple climate variables impacting livestock production in rural communities. On the other hand, drought (19.05%) and increasing temperatures (14.23%) are becoming an area of concern from various country’s researchers and academic role players. Few studies solely focused on rain variability (4.76%) and weather extremes (2.38%).Therefore studies have taken a more generalist approach, tending to combine multiple climate variables. Climate change risks to livestock production have been part of many impact studies in the past twenty-one years. A proportion of 59.52% of the published articles simultaneously looked at multiple impacts of climate change on livestock production in rural communities ( Figure 3B ). At the same time, a limited number of articles solely looked at impact domains such as feed availability (14.29%), disease outbreaks (11.91%), heat load (7.14%), reproduction (4.76%), and livestock records (2.38%). Figure 3C shows that 88.09% of the reviewed publications mainly focused on livestock production alone, while the rest of the articles (11.91%) looked at the mixed crop-livestock systems. Figure 3D shows that a large proportion of the reviewed publications focused on cattle (42.88%), goats (26.19%) and sheep (16.67%). Few published articles were on chicken (7.14%) and pigs (7.14%). A summary of the documented effects of different climate shocks on livestock production is presented in Table 1 . It appeared that these impact areas have various interactions with one another and imply that climate change affects livestock in numerous ways. For instance, heat stress directly impacts animals through production, reproduction, livestock numbers, disease occurrences, and product quality. At the same time, production aspects and livestock statistics were most likely affected by the indirect effects of heat stress, outbreak of diseases, reproduction, production, and feeds. The climate change impact studies on livestock production have thus been generalized. However, they have exhibited that conceptually, the impact of climate change on livestock production is complex and intertwined.

The geographic distribution of the published literature on climate change impact on livestock production is presented in Figure 4 . It was noted that 38.10% of the published articles is from the Eastern Cape, while KwaZulu Natal and Limpopo contribute 19.05% each, respectively. Few publications have been documented from Western Cape (9.52%), Free State (7.14%), Mpumalanga (4.76%), and Northern Cape (2.38%). None of the publications on climate change risks to rural livestock production have been recorded in Gauteng and the North West province of the country. It was further noted that the published articles on various climatic shocks were unevenly distributed across the country’s provinces. Of the 16 publications conducted in the Eastern Cape Province (EC) of the country, 8 articles were on multiple climate variables while the rest were on temperature variation (4) and weather extremes (1). None of the publications conducted in the Eastern Cape were solely focused on drought. On the other hand, 4 published articles from Limpopo were done on multiple climate variables, while two papers were focused on temperature variation. Furthermore, two papers documented drought (1) and rainfall (1) impacts on livestock production. KwaZulu Natal had 5 publications on drought while the rest were on multiple climate variables (2), rainfall variation, and increasing temperature (1). About 3 of the selected publications in Free State were done on multiple climate variables while Mpumalanga had two papers on the same subject. Only 1 published article was documented in Northern Cape, with drought as a climate change risk of interest. The distribution of the studies also reflects the livestock distribution within the country. Most livestock are found in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo Provinces. Consequently, climate change will have higher impact on livestock production based on their distributions. The temperature variations were topically in these major livestock production provinces.

Various adaptation options to climate change impact on livestock production were reported on 42 publications selected in the current study ( Table 2 ). Destocking or selling of a certain portion of livestock during dry months appeared as the most common response, followed by buying feeds to supplement animals during drought and dry months of the year chosen by farmers to avoid further production and financial losses. However, only farmers with improved socio-economic status purchased supplementary feeds. From the selected articles, it was pointed out that farmers resort to complementary breeding of indigenous or local breeds with improved animal genotypes to better the resilience of their livestock towards the prevailing harsh climatic conditions in rural communities. Some published articles reported that farmers planted trees and constructed shades to protect their livestock against the increasing temperatures and other problematic weather extremes in rural communities. Drilling boreholes and buying water tanks became a common response adopted by resource-constrained farmers to obtaining and preserving water for use during drought periods. Seeking veterinary advice and extension services from agricultural institutions and research institutes is gaining popularity from many rural resource constraint farmers across the provinces of South Africa. Transformations of production systems and farmers’ livelihoods have evolved as another adaptation option in livestock systems. Some examples include the shifting in choice of livestock and other species and moving from cropping to livestock farming in response to changing rainfall and more frequent drought occurrences. Thus, drought has been a major climatic shock that has received multiple responses such as destocking, supplementary feeding, breed improvement and diversification.

Climate change impact on rural livestock production has become a centre of attention in South Africa since the 2000s (Dube and Jury, 2000). Recently, this attraction has been triggered by the strong El Nino phenomenon that resulted in one of the most severe droughts experienced by the country in the past 35 years (Lottering et al., 2021). Eight of the country’s provinces were declared disaster areas due to excessive heat and delayed rains (Mare et al., 2018). This assertion had triggered ongoing public debates and agenda on livestock production at the local, district and even at national level (Meissner et al., 2013). These arguments have been strengthened by the ongoing production and financial losses experienced by livestock farmers in rural communities (Mandleni and Anim, 2011). Based on the data published on the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT 2017), the economic damage caused by the South African drought alone in 2015/16 was estimated at US$250 million. Fifteen percent reduction on national livestock herd was recorded in the year-2015 and this includes 40 000 dead cattle recorded in KwaZulu Natal alone (Lottering et al., 2020a). Research carried out on seven of South Africa’s nine provinces revealed a 14.4% national cattle herd decline between 2013 and early 2016 due to climate change (Maluleke and Mokwena, 2017). Farming debt in the country escalated by 9%, leading to many farmers being unable to destock or prepare financially (Popoola et al., 2020). At the same time, the cost to farmers increased by 177% (Molieleng et al., 2021), making it very difficult as most of the farmers had to rely on buying feed to sustain their livestock production (Talanow et al., 2021). In most cases, such costs were done to maintain the core herd (Popoola et al., 2019). It has been anticipated that will take years to recover (Tibesigwa et al., 2017).

Attempts to assist with selling stock as climate-related incidents like drought develop typically failed as many livestock farmers resisted reducing their capital assets under pressure (Vetter et al., 2020). Uncertainty in drought forecasting made things worse and brought disastrous consequences (Lottering et al., 2020b), because by the time livestock are marketed, the body condition is poor. The numbers are too large to be readily immersed by marketing channels (Slayi et al., 2021), resulting in very low prices, lack of sales and eventually deaths (Taruvinga et al., 2013). Predicting the timing, duration, and magnitude of climate change risks remains challenging, but the magnitude of livestock losses and livelihood impacts also depends on other climatic, ecological and socio-economic factors (Popoola et al., 2020). Complex interactions amongst contributing factors to climate change is a big challenge for livestock farmers and those offering support services (Musemwa et al., 2012). Insufficient literature and reliability of the existing data on the effects of climate change on communal livestock farming is questioned mainly by various climate scientists and policy makers (Scholtz et al., 2014; Mare et al., 2018). The current study identified 62 published articles on climate change impact on livestock production in the country. Given the continued socio-economic role of livestock in the country, their substantial share of the country’s livestock holdings (some 5.6 million cattle herd, or 41% of the national total), and the large proportion of households directly involved, this is a prominent knowledge gap. Currently, a large proportion of published articles were survey data rather than experimental investigations. This variation has raised a lot of public debates among climate scientists in the past two decades. Other researchers claim that most experiments are unrealistic because they do not correspond to the projected climate scenarios for a specific region (Clarke et al., 2012). The debate on the reliability of experimental studies on climate change scenarios calls for common procedures for future experiments. Survey research has been promoted as a suitable method to determine the socio-economic aspect and background information of climate change impact on livestock production. However, this has raised some disagreements between climate scientists and policy developers to develop climate change policies and proper mitigation strategies. It has been noted that universities are at the forefront of climate change research in South Africa. This finding agrees with Mpandeli et al. (2015), highlighting that universities are vital hubs of research and teaching on climate change. Besides conducting scientific research and promoting innovation on climate change and sustainability, institutions of higher learning have a duty to engage communities on climate change impact and support community mitigation and adaptation interventions.

Although the literature on climate change impact and mitigation in livestock production systems is gaining more research attention, five areas of concern and needs were noted in the current review article on rural communities of South Africa.