Environmental Impacts of Intensive Agriculture and Livestock Farming

ABSTRACT:
Food is a basic need for survival and various types of food production systems are practiced in different physiographic, climatic and cultural regions of the earth. However, inappropriate practices and ‘beyond-the-limit’ pressure on the relevant natural resources create several adverse environmental impacts on land, water and air. This project focusses on two different case studies in two different regions.

Case-1:
The farmers in the ‘Green Revolution Zone’ of North-West India carry intensive cultivation of rice and wheat in two major cropping seasons and utilize the short inter-cropping period for growing vegetable etc. Many of them clear the fields for one-after-the-other crop by stubble and crop-residue burning in the fields which creates massive air pollution affecting millions of people across the Northern Indian planes. This aspect requires spatio-temporal analysis for identifying the hotspots and formulating appropriate preventive measures.

Case-2:
The physiographic and climatic condition in Central Asia and Mongolia impose constraints on large scale and multi-season crop cultivation but these regions have vast rangelands to support grazing and rearing of livestock. The number of livestock have increased enormously over the recent decades causing imbalance between grazing and re-growth of grasses in the pastures. Pasture degradation in these areas is resulting from a combination of overgrazing the booming livestock numbers, climate change (droughts, harsh winters) and lack of effective regulations. This is slowly leading to desertification and threatening traditional pasture based livelihoods.

In depth understanding of the multi-faceted adverse environmental impacts of intensive crop cultivation and extensive livestock farming systems in various physiographic and climatic regions requires efficient technologies and sophisticate methodologies. Remote Sensing systems have the technologies for capturing various types of spatial data and Geoinformatics have developed the methods for processing and analysing the crucial information and have the tools for re-presenting the present, re-constructing past and projecting the future of environmental problems in these areas.

In the light of the above mentioned facts, this project aims at the following:

- Organise short intensive Faculty Development Workshops and Expert Level Dissemination Seminars at each partner institution in India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

- Organise professional training at the host institution in Austria for the selected incoming teachers / researchers from the partner institutions in India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

The reason for organising short intensive Faculty Development Workshops and Expert Level Dissemination Seminars is to share the ’know-how’ regarding the identification and monitoring of geospatial indicators for environmental impact assessment of inappropriate practices prevalent in various food production systems on land, water and air and to generate higher multiplier effect within short period of each intensive workshop as well as to initiate a network for future cooperation.