Pastoralism offers a productive and profitable—but also sustainable—form of food production in many settings across the region covered by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). While climate change is exacerbating many of the existing environmental challenges facing livestock producers— especially drought—pastoralism nonetheless offers an extraordinarily resilient form of primary production that is well-suited to adapt to these changes. In fact, given future projections for the volume and variability of precipitation across much of the IGAD region, pastoralism may become an even more crucial contributor to regional food security, sustainable livelihoods and economic development in the 21st Century.
Policies and programmes to support pastoral resilience often focus on promoting specific adaptations. While this may be beneficial in the short-term, trends change and old adaptation strategies may become less suitable or even maladaptive. Rather than following pre-selected adaptation pathways, pastoralists must be equipped to adjust their adaptive strategies in response to ever-shifting climatic and environmental changes. Accordingly, climate resilience policies should focus not only on promoting specific adaptations, but on providing long-term support for adaptive capacity.
Adaptive capacity refers to the ability of pastoralists to successfully respond and adapt to evolving challenges as well as emerging opportunities. It relies heavily on optionality, which encompasses the range of strategies that people have at their disposal to respond to challenges or take advantage of opportunities. One important example of optionality is the ability to move herds quickly and flexibly to access water and pasture as they become available at different places and times. If movement is restricted, optionality is diminished, thereby reducing the capacity of pastoralists to respond and adapt to shifting pasture and water availability.
This report brings together the most recent literature on pastoralism, mobility and climate change in the IGAD region in order to highlight the regional climate hazards facing pastoralists in the years ahead, and to identify evidence-based strategies for promoting their resilience in the face of adverse and often unpredictable environmental changes. The report is structured as follows:
Chapter 1 begins with an overview of key concepts and an outline of the regional and thematic scope of this study.
Chapter 2 reviews the key climate change trends and projections in the IGAD region. These include less reliable rainy seasons and more frequent drought events. The short rains may experience increased precipitation in some areas, but this rainfall would probably occur with high intensity, thus resulting in flooding and high levels of run-off wherein much water does not permeate the soil. Changes in temperature profile include higher average temperatures and longer periods of extreme heat.
Chapter 3 describes the hazards that these climate trends present to pastoralists. Most climate hazards are amplifications of existing challenges to which pastoralists are already responding with varying levels of adaptive success. Key hazards include increased frequency, intensity and duration of droughts, floods and other extreme precipitation events, changes to rangeland ecology that may reduce seasonal reliability of fodder, increased exposure to heat stress, changes in the geographical distribution of livestock disease and additional risks associated with changing conflict scenarios.
Chapter 4 reviews the foundations of adaptive capacity among pastoralists in the IGAD region. Key pillars of optionality are reviewed, including the extensivity of rangeland ecosystems (which is disrupted by restrictive border regimes), the possibility for trans-border mobility, the diversity of pastoralists’ economic profiles, and the ability of pastoralists and their institutions to participate effectively in political processes.
Source: Intergovernmental Authority on Development