**2. Climate resilient small ruminant production**

Climate change leading to adverse changes in temperature, precipitation and sea level will disturb the food, water and livelihood security systems. The impacts of climate change on livestock are on its growth, milk production, reproduction, metabolic activity and disease occurrences. The indirect impacts include (i) scarce availability of water, pasture and other feed resources, (ii) health anomalies associated with modified/unknown vector-borne and parasitic diseases, (iii) competing environmental interaction with other livestock species. It is important to understand the small ruminant vis-à-vis other livestock responses to the changed climatic environment and to analyze them in order to design modifications of nutritional and environmental management, thereby improving animal comfort and performance. In many countries, there is a scarcity of forage for ruminants feeding because of climatic conditions and shortage of water resources. The success of small ruminant rearing mostly depends on congenial macro- and micro-environments and the effectiveness of the ameliorating measures taken to reduce the stress factors. Adapting to climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions may require significant changes in production technology and farming systems that could affect productivity. Globally, livestock contribute to 18% of the humangenerated greenhouse gases, and the main components include methane (CH4 ) produced by the belching of animals (25%), carbon dioxide (CO<sup>2</sup> ) by uses of land due to decomposition of organic substances (32%) and nitrous oxide (N<sup>2</sup> O) due to spreading of manure and slurry over land (31%) [3]. One of the best ways of mitigating enteric methane emission could be improvement of the feed and forage of the ruminant animals to enhance the feed-conversion efficiencies in the production of a unit of milk or meat.
