The United Nations’ COP28 conference on climate change, currently underway in Dubai, highlights sensitive questions over food and land, including many relevant for pastoral areas.
In agrarian settings around the world, climate change involves disrupted weather patterns, as well as changes to seasons and conditions for animals. These impacts come on top of class inequalities and other social injustices, and the pressures of globalisation and industrialisation of food systems.
Meanwhile, countries around the world are under pressure to reform food and land to mitigate or adapt to climate change. As carbon emissions continue to rise rapidly, high-level political demands increase for more dramatic and radical changes on shorter timescales.
For pastoralists, who depend on mobility and access to resources, this means being alert to growing competition over land and space. Changes linked to climate action – including conservation initiatives, carbon forestry schemes, changes in diets, intensification of agriculture and changes in markets or job opportunities, can all affect pastoral systems in different ways.
Rural areas and climate change
Rural areas are often the sites of schemes that aim to ‘solve’ or address climate change, shaped by the demands of capitalism and state interests, but the people most affected often have little say on how these projects are designed or carried out.
A new book, Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies, explores the effects of climate change and responses to it on the rural world, including contributions from scholars of critical agrarian studies from around the world.
The book is co-edited by Ian Scoones, co-lead researcher of the PASTRES project, and is available open access to download or read online.
Pastoral issues
Pastoral areas are affected by new markets and interests in technological and ‘nature-based’ solutions, including climate-smart agriculture, conservation projects, carbon offsetting schemes and carbon sequestration in forests. Meanwhile, new energy regimes, driving construction of solar parks and mining for renewables and battery storage, create new competition over land and space.
In this context, pastoral perspectives are often marginalised. The series of briefings and report from PASTRES, under the heading ‘Are livestock always bad for the planet?’, explore how pastoralism differs from other forms of food production, and how pastoral views could be made more central in debates about the future of food.
Livestock are often blamed for climate change, justifying the take-over of rangelands for other projects. Mass-production and over-consumption of meat is certainly a cause of various environmental harms, including carbon emissions and deforestation.
But not all production systems are the same, and traditional extensive pastoralists, working on historic grazing lands, are often ‘lumped in’ with other more damaging forms of production. Millions of people worldwide who depend on livestock with relatively lower climate impacts are being ignored by debates on the future of food.
Listening to pastoralists
These arguments over food and the climate are partly shaped by how and where evidence is produced, and whose knowledge counts.
Most approaches to assessing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock systems use ‘lifecycle analyses’ (LCAs). But the vast majority of LCAs look at industrial systems from high-income countries, and they are based on ‘per animal’ assessments rather than taking a systems approach that places the animal in context. And initiatives such as ‘rewilding’, ‘land sparing’ or conservation often fail to promote a justice perspective that protects the land and livelihoods of local, small-scale and indigenous livestock producers.
In fact, pastoralists are often well-placed to be allies in the struggle to respond to climate change. Extensive livestock-keepers and pastoralists make use of challenging and variable environments to produce meat, milk and other products in areas where crop agriculture may be difficult. Their local knowledge and careful breeding and herding practices can offer many benefits to rangeland environments.
Designing climate-aware policies for pastoral areas also means understanding how pastoralists think and work. For example, insurance is increasingly offered as a way to mitigate against shocks like droughts, but pastoralists continue to need and use other strategies, including diversification, livestock sharing and mobility.
These responses are useful because the risks and effects of shocks and stresses are often difficult to assess and calculate. Flexible, adaptive and caring responses, with relationships at their heart, are vital for preparing and responding to the unknown. Thinking like a pastoralist also means embracing uncertainty in the way that we imagine the future.
Land, carbon and biodiversity
Questions over land and carbon markets, and the politics and power involved in them, are more urgent than ever. For example, the Dubai-based Blue Carbon initiative has secured forested land across five African countries (including almost 20% of Zimbabwe’s land) to create carbon credits. There are huge incentives for countries in need of income to give over land to schemes that promise to sequester carbon.
But this raises the question of what happens to these lands and the people who rely on them. Evidence suggests many carbon offset schemes fail to deliver what they promise, and instead provide a mechanism for polluters to keep on emitting carbon as usual. Biodiversity is an important part of this picture too: it is linked to similar processes of enclosure, with a growing interest in ‘biodiversity offsets’.
In 2026, the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists will draw more international attention to the challenges for pastoral areas. The IYRP highlights the problems of dispossession and restrictions faced by pastoralists, and points to their value to ecologies and landscapes.
As global efforts to tackle climate change become more intense, there is an urgent need to learn from people who understand, live and work with diverse ecologies – including pastoralists.
Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience - PASTRES 