In most cases, older people in rural villages persistently rely on practising their own old experiences, which might not fit the varying nature of climatic changes. Realizing that they could not actively manage to boost their income sources, they rather transfer their wealth to their children in the form of gift or bequest. Even if they have long-term prospects to re-invest their financial holdings, older people commonly rely on supports from young family members . In the Afar drylands areas where households are sensitized to the effects of drought occurrences, access to water harvesting actions could have important implications on their income improvement. In this study, access to water sources was found to have a positive and statistically significant effect on household income . The positive result suggests that most agro-pastoralists and mixed-farming communities sought to cope with several drought events by engaging in various small scale irrigation schemes such as flood diversion from the Tigray highlands, which had positively contributed to their income. Most mixed-farming communities and agropastoralists that relied on perennial water sources produce vegetables and crops whereas semipastoralists and pastoralists that live distantly from perennial water sources depend on ponds that might be used only for few months. Moreover, community members who are near to perennial water sources are able to enhance sedentary way of life due to the opportunity it offers them for better access to animal feed and improved income. In tackling drought related challenges owing to climate change, farm communities who are aware of the importance of water sources for the improvement of their income sources have engaged in water harvesting activities. Particularly, the Afar pastorals, semi-pastorals and agro-pastorals moved to potential areas where they could find natural grazing and water sources for their livestock. As shown in Table 6,ebb and flow rolling benches the estimation results of the fixed effects model indicate that migration is positively and significantly related to the household income.
The results further reveal that households who keep moving their cattle herds to better pasture had achieved higher income than those who never moved. In congruence with this finding, Moritz et al. indicated that livestock mobility is the innovative means of sustaining rural livelihoods by which pastoralists are able to fully utilize untapped rangeland resources in distant areas. Household heads further explained their past experiences that livestock mobility has been used to escape away during a disease breakout in a specific area. In the Afar culture, people widely share information and new events by way of traditional communication called Dagu . With the help of getting information via Dagu, pastorals and agro-pastorals used to move their livestock to safer areas. Overall, migration for the Afar pastoralists serves as a means to search livestock feed and water, as a strategy to rescue their livestock from unexpected events, as a channel to reach new market opportunities and as a pathway to build social capital with newly contacted people in their destination areas . More importantly, pastoral mobility serves a source of income in areas where crop cultivation has not yet been applied. Recently, reported research findings indicated that pastoralists in west and east African countries have continued to respond to climate-related challenges by moving their livestock to better areas . In contrary, other research reports suggest that the pastoral mode of life is an outdated system, which is currently in crisis owing to ‘too many people and few livestock’, which has created imbalances among humans, livestock and the environment . Besides cattle, livestock diversification that includes small ruminants is found to have a significant relationship with income . The pursuance of households on diversified livestock strategies might allow them to build locally fitting adaptive capacity, which would enable them to address problems related to climatic risks and uncertainties. In the study area, households that diversify their livestock had easy access to liquid money via sales of livestock products and live animals. Likewise, Degefa reported that people that pursue diversified income sources through production of improved livestock varieties such as cattle, camel, goats and sheep are more likely to achieve sustainable livelihoods. The implication is that diversified income may serve as a means to heighten the purchasing power of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists, by which they can easily access staple foods and veterinary services .
It was also found that getting access to animal feed through production of hay and straw had a positive and statistically significant effect on income . The positive effect of animal feed on the mean income shows that households would like to gather hay and straw to reduce unexpected losses of animals due to risks associated to lack of fodder. On one side, households that collected animal feed using own family labour were able to save some portion of money that might have spent for hiring labour. This suggests that households having easy access to collect hay and straw are more likely to earn a higher income. Therefore, communities in the Afar region put their efforts into collecting hay and straw to feed their animals. Particularly, feed collection in Aba’ala is usually practised by mixed-farming and agro-pastoral community members during THE wet season. Informants further expressed that livestock owners who collected excess hay and straw can earn extra income by selling some of it during dry season.The exposome comprises the totality of environmental exposures experienced from conception onwards during a human life and has been associated with human health outcomes. Both allergens and microbes are often associated with inhalable airborne particles; these particles have a substantial impact on human immune response and health outcomes. The indoor air microbiome, or aerobiome, represents an exchange nexus between a number of different sources of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including humans , pets, and outside air. In the developed world, the average person spends upwards of 87% of their time indoors, including one third of their lives sleeping, during which they inhale significant quantities of indoor air. The human microbiome can dramatically shape the indoor environment through the dispersal of skin and respiratory-associated microbes, with approximately 37 million bacterial genomic units and 7million fungal genomic units released from the average person per hour. Allergens are defined as antigens, including microbial cells and metabolic products, that can lead to a type I immune reaction in people with atopy , mainly through the immunoglobulin E response pathway. Indoor air quality and antigenic burden are of special concern for human health, with indoor mold exposure shown to correlate with allergic diseases. Conversely, children who are exposed to a greater degree of dust associated microbial diversity often have lower rates of asthma.
Household aerosols can modulate immune response in a protective manner depending on the constituents.Indoor and outdoor air have a large overlap in bacterial composition, with indoor air closely resembling outdoor air. Outdoor air has been shown to be a significant contributor to the indoor aerobiome, with 50% or more of the community composition attributable to outdoor sources However, there is a significant enrichment of human-associated bacteria in indoors relative to outdoor air, and this can vary based on building design. Outdoor air is often significantly more microbiologically diverse than indoor air. Sources of bacteria associated with airborne dust indoors can have originated from soil and plant leaf surfaces, and the types and sources can vary by season due to changing ecological conditions, as well as by geographic location. Seasonal variation in the microbial constituents of outdoor air has been demonstrated in Chicago , where a large proportion of the summer aerobiome comprises soil- and leaf-associated bacteria. How this outdoor air variability influences indoor air is highly dependent upon building design. At the same time, the indoor aerobiome is often less diverse than the outdoors and can maintain a greater proportion of bacteria closely related to known pathogens. In outdoor air, these bacteria are often significantly less abundant or below the level of detection. Therefore, indoor airborne allergen exposure comprises both endogenous and exogenous sources. Prior studies have examined the dust and constituent particles in the air of many built environments , which have been documented in recent publications from the NHANES 2005– 2006 program. Airborne allergen quantification and characterization have, in the past,rolling benches hydro been more technically challenging than collection of settled dust with a vacuum cleaner. Settled dust is not necessarily representative of inhaled air, and here, we leveraged the Inspirotec electrokinetic air sampling device that allows for the collection of airborne allergens. This device is sufficiently simple to operate that samples can be collected by the patients themselves, in their own homes. In this study, we deployed the Inspirotec sampling device in 65 Chicago area homes, which were occupied by patients with clinically diagnosed allergy and asthma, as part of a larger study incorporating measurement of common household allergen profiles. The microbiota and airborne allergens were analyzed from the same samples, and differences in allergen and aerobiome profiles between bedrooms were assessed along with survey data from participants, providing a Microbiome Wide Association Study between the different environments.In this study, we characterize the various factors that influence the diversity and composition of the aerobiome of bedrooms in the Chicago area. A small number of prevalent bacteria form a “core microbiome,” suggesting either a common source of these bacteria or common factors that promote a similar community. If there is a significant outdoor component, the core microbiome would represent a group of ubiquitously distributed organisms. By contrast, if homes independently assemble, the presence of common core organisms could represent similar conditions across homes selecting for similar communities. There is some evidence that indoor air communities assemble in a manner independent of the specific occupants of the respective built environment, suggesting a large outdoor component. Further, it is unclear if these core organisms represent a set of unique strain-level organisms or an ensemble of closely related organisms. As our sequences are clustered into operational taxonomic units at 97% nucleotide identity, our data is not sufficient to distinguish between closely related organisms. Further, this may not be improved by sub-OTU methods, as 16S data is often not capable of distinguishing strain-level organisms. Finally, geographic proximity is significantly positively correlated with bacterial community similarity, which supports an outdoor contribution, as homes that are close together would have more similar input from outdoor air.
Despite the large number of allergens sampled, few appear to have a relationship to the aerobiome, which may be due to insufficient sample size or lack of microbial association. This may be addressed by a more focused study with a large sample size for many of the allergens. At the same time, a number of allergens appear to have links to changes in community composition. Correlation of dog ownership with diversity and changes in the composition of the microbial community is well known, and thus, the observation that both dog allergen and dog ownership appear to have this effect is unsurprising. The difference between microbial communities that associate with dog ownership and dog allergen load may be explained by the fact that these are not identical populations. At one end of the distribution, homes with dog ownership and no dog allergen detected could indicate a tight home where dogs are excluded from the bedroom and the air supply to the bedroom is well controlled. At the other end, homes with dog allergen and no dog ownership could represent a sub-population in which dog allergen is introduced by some outside traffic entering homes from unknown external sources, but not with an attendant associated microbial community. This study demonstrates that dog allergen load as well as geographical location can influence the aerobiome captured in homes and that distinct microbial sub-communities arise in relation to these factors. Interestingly, this relationship was not observed for cats, which could be because cats are commonly indoor only pets and likely would not contribute to the dispersal of exogenous microbiota into residential homes. Mold allergens also had a significant correlation with bacterial diversity. Their presence may not represent a causal relationship, but may be the result of a possible unidentified common causal factor. Alternaria is a genus of saprophytic fungi found in soil and decaying plant matter and is a common allergen in humid regions. It has also been found to be a constituent of indoor air, especially in households with indoor plants.