Masters of Land Use: A Closer Look at Pastoralist Livestock Management
When people think of pastoral systems or indeed pastoralists, it is probable they think of a person surrounded by livestock in a field. What is rarely considered are the complex interactions of pastoral systems with the natural and human environment and vice versa. In a recent study analysing the literature on pastoral systems we have examined which drivers of pastoral change and which Nature’s Contributions to People (NCPs) are most commonly occuring in scientific research.
Pastoral systems are a form of traditional livestock system that has survived for thousands of years all over the world. Today these systems can be found everywhere from Asia to Latin America — and many places in between. There is lively debate about the exact number of pastoralists in the world, with numbers ranging from 500 million to over 1 billion people being considered pastoralists, using an estimated 25% of all the world’s land. Pastoral systems share generalised characteristics in that they are well adapted to uncertainty and defined by an impressive degree of resource management. It can be argued that pastoral systems play an important role in creating and maintaining many biodiversity hotspots around the world due to their ability to create diverse habitats through extensive grazing practices.
Pastoralists as masters of land use
Think of the Nomads of the African plains who use mobility as a tool to overcome the unpredictability of access to water and pasture. Or the shepherds of the Spanish Pyrenees who move their livestock long distances, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from the high mountain pasture down to the lowlands. They do so to protect their livestock from harsh winters and to help secure adequate pasture and natural resources before returning the livestock to the cooler fertile high mountains as summer begins. Pastoralists are masters of land use:
Integrating where possible all useful aspects of their ecosystems, from forests to grasslands to agricultural feed, they can and do use the most efficient combination of ecosystems to increase their resilience wherever possible.
Despite this adaptability, pastoral systems are unfortunately in decline in many parts of the world. This is due to a combination of different environmental, social and economic factors. From climate change making traditional landscapes less habitable, to the exodus of rural inhabitants to urban settings, leaving less and less people to continue pastoral professions and traditions. In addition, certain economic and governance policies make it hard for pastoralists to continue with traditional practices and compete in the global free market.
Researching pastoral systems
Pastoral systems can be considered as socio-ecological systems, since they are the direct result of a continuous and complex interaction of nature and people. Pastoral systems have even been defined as “an adaptive network of biophysical and social flows generated and maintained by the movement of shepherds and livestock”*. To fully appreciate the complexity of pastoral systems, researchers have for many years used the Ecosystem Services framework as a way to measure the services provided by pastoral systems.
Recently, however, a new useful way of researching human-nature systems has emerged: The Nature’s Contributions to People (NCP) framework was developed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to help understand the complexity of socio-ecological systems.
NCP are “all contributions both positive and negative of living nature to people’s quality of life”**. They are broadly classified as material, non-material and regulating — supporting identity would e.g. be a non-material NCP, while the maintenance of habitats would be an example of a regulating one.
This framework is designed to help capture the social aspect of human-nature systems more inclusively than previous ones. This is why it is such a potentially useful framework for studying pastoral systems, the social and cultural aspects of which are often overlooked. Pastoralists are both users and producers of NCP; due to the complex history of human-nature interactions, which is subject to many external influences or drivers of change, it is nearly impossible to distinguish which NCP are used and which ones are created by pastoralist land-use systems.
Nature’s Contributions in pastoral systems research
Our team at the Chair of Agroecology at UVic, Barcelona examined a wide body of pastoral literature with a global scope, aiming to determine whether the NCP framework is an appropriate tool to analyse pastoral systems and how the NCP are in turn connected to different drivers of change in these systems. The results of this analysis showed that throughout the world, pastoral systems are most commonly studied in mountain systems, while in Africa the majority of pastoral systems studied exist in grasslands.
18 different NCP were associated with pastoral systems in the literature: The most commonly found NCP were Habitat creation and maintenance, Supporting identities and Food & Feed, representing all three categories (again: regulating, non-material, material). However, these NCP were not evenly distributed across continents, and distinct patterns of distribution appeared: Literature on European pastoral systems showed the largest representation of regulating NCP such as Habitat creation and maintenance and the smallest representation of Non-Material NCP such as Supporting identities. Research on Africa included the largest representation of studies displaying non-material and material NCP, but the smallest amount of regulating ones.
Moreover, we identified a total of 12 drivers of change within pastoral systems: These ranged from socioeconomic drivers, such as tourism and globalisation, to policies that affect pastoral systems and climate change — to name but a few. Drivers of change in pastoral systems are important for understanding the pressures affecting them. They were found to be closely linked with the most common NCP encountered in the analysis, namely Food & Feed, Habitat creation and maintenance and Supporting identities.
Distinct patterns and gaps in research
To conclude, the study not only showed the appropriateness of the NCP framework for the examination of pastoral systems, but also its potential to create new opportunities to examine people’s relationship with the natural environment. It also highlighted the complexity of pastoral systems and the many social, economic and environmental pressures placed on them at different times and in different places.
Every region faces its own unique set of challenges in securing the future of traditional livestock systems.
Perhaps the most surprising result of the analysis was the abundance of non-material NCP in the literature, which was heavily present in research on every world region except Europe. Since it is unlikely that European pastoralists do not create a sense of identity or gain experiences from their actions, this rather raises questions of how traditional livestock systems are perceived in Europe: The lack of attention to non-material NCP may be a result of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), in which financial supports for the preservation of non-material NCP are limited.
Equally regulating NCP were under-represented outside of Europe, which is suprising considering the power of pastoral systems to regulate extreme events such as fire, and to maintain and create landscapes rich in biodiversity.
Pastoral systems’ multi-layered complexity and resilience
No two pastoral systems are exactly alike, as each system has developed as a response to a unique set of environmental, social, political and economic challenges. The challenges faced by different pastoral systems highlight the importance of context-specific views and research acknowledging the history and cultures of peoples still practising pastoralism. The NCP framework carries the potential to help in the challenge of understanding complexity, while keeping context-specific views firmly in mind.
Given how important pastoral systems are for creating biodiversity-rich landscapes, especially in mountain systems and biodiversity hotspots such as the Mediterranean basin or the Himalayas,
it is essential that society and the scientific community recognise and value the multi-layered complexity of these resilient systems that have proven for thousands of years their capability to support not only life, but also cultures.
Full Study: Dean, G., Rivera-Ferre, M.G., Rosas-Casals, M., Lopez-i-Gelats, F. (2021): Nature’s contribution to people as a framework for examining socioecological systems: The case of pastoral systems. Ecosystem Services 49. URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2021.101265 .
*Oteros-Rozas et al., 2012, Evaluating Ecosystem Services in Transhumance Cultural Landscapes. Gaia, https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.21.3.9
**Diaz et al. 2018, Assessing nature’s contributions to people. Science (80-.). 359, 270–272. 10.1126/science.aap8826
