Pastoralism through the lenses of climate change: narratives, methodologies and carbon

Abstract (English)

Climate change is not just about extreme weather events or the growing risk of triggering tipping points in Earth systems; it is also about the narratives it generates (Fressoz 2024; Klepp and Chavez-Rodriguez 2018). Policies and interventions shaped by the climate agenda have profound implications for development trajectories, geopolitical priorities, and economic decision-making at higher scales. This panel focuses on the complex interplay between climate change, socio-economic factors, and pastoralist adaptation, assessing the assumptions that frame pastoral vulnerability as primarily environmental (Swyngedouw 2011).

Traditional pastoral systems have thrived for millennia all over the world by navigating climatic variability (FAO 2021; Behnke et al. 2011), yet dominant climate change narratives place them amongst the most vulnerable groups (World Bank Group 2021). We are interested in research that distinguishes between the biophysical manifestations of climate change and people’s experience of them, acknowledging the mediation of socio-economic factors, including intersectional differences. We look at how processes of transformation in mobility patterns, multi-scale changes in resource access, and policy shifts like financialisation, interact with pastoralists’ adaptive strategies and exposure to climate risk.

We are also interested in how ‘climate change’ has been absorbed into existing narratives on pastoralism, reinforcing long-standing misconceptions and policy biases, while depoliticising pastoralists’ challenges by shifting attention away from governance failures, a history of ill-informed interventions, structural and new inequalities. This includes understanding how climate finance might at time reflect a similar interplay of old and new assumptions, reinforcing historical inequalities (Venner et al 2024). While new opportunities emerge, does access remain skewed toward elites and sedentary populations, leaving pastoralists at a disadvantage? In particular, we are interested in understanding how this relates to the expanding carbon market for rangeland restoration, given how it currently frames pastoralism as the driver of land degradation, prescribing an exogenous management model as the cure (Lesorogol 2022).

Finally, popular narratives frame all greenhouse gas emissions as responsible for climate change, failing to distinguish between the ecologically integrated emissions that make our planet warm enough for life to thrive, and the additional emissions from fossil-fuel and deforestation that are raising global average temperature to levels that threat life on Earth. These narratives undermine pastoral systems by equating their ecologically integrated greenhouse gas emissions with those of industrial systems, and so attributing them a role in causing climate change (Houzer and Scoones 2021). We welcome the critical analysis of this shortfall, its roots in communication and methodology, and its consequences for climate resilience in pastoral systems.