Pastoralists have lived with drought for generations. The world needs their lessons
Andrew Msami's Maasai community in northeastern Tanzania has always measured wealth in cattle. Herd size determines social position, and wealth is often kept in animals rather than banks. But after years of deepening drought, Msami and many others have been forced to sell cattle and buy goats. Goats can tolerate drier conditions, but they are worth less financially and carry less cultural weight. Adaptation to a shifting climate has long been part of Maasai life, Msami says. What he and his community are facing now is different.
“We have to adapt because it's like desertification is attacking our identity,” Msami said. “If you lose your identity, it means you have lost everything.”
Msami is a pastoralist, one of an estimated 500 million people around the world who raise livestock on rangelands that cover roughly half of the Earth's land surface. Pastoralists often move with their herds in search of grass and water, and they have built societies in some of the planet's most arid, volatile regions. That has made them especially vulnerable to climate change. It has also given them generations of experience in responding to it.
Around the world, those rangelands are under mounting pressure. Drought and land degradation now threaten pastoral systems from Tanzania to Sudan, Nepal to Mongolia. Desertification is occurring at 30 to 35 times the historical average, and pastoral communities are also dealing with invasive species, extractive industries, tourism and other pressures. The combination has begun to test even the most resilient communities.
This week, Msami is in Mongolia for the 17th meeting of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, or UNCCD, along with hundreds of pastoralists from Africa, Asia and beyond. They are pushing for formal protection of Indigenous pastoral traditions, direct access to climate funding, and official recognition that their experience living on marginal land is a form of expertise the rest of the world needs.
Msami, who is program lead for the Pastoralists Indigenous Non-Governmental Organizations Forum, or PINGOs Forum, a network of more than 50 pastoralist organizations in Tanzania, put the argument plainly: “We want to give the world a message that it's not only the land that you will have to really look at. You look at the people in that land, and maybe their lives should not be disturbed or sacrificed for the development of the world.”
For decades, desertification has been treated as the poor cousin of the major environmental crises. The 1992 Earth Summit identified climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification as three global emergencies, but in the years that followed, the first two drew trillions of dollars and regular high-level summits. Desertification was largely left to developing countries. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a Mbororo pastoralist from Chad and the first chair of the Indigenous peoples caucus at UNCCD, said that is changing only now that drought has reached Europe.
“When you look at Spain, France, even Sweden, all those countries, they have a bigger drought ever since the last two years,” Ibrahim said. “So it is becoming a developed countries issue, and now they start paying more attention, but still it does not get the same attention on the level of political will or finance.”
This year's meeting is the first UNCCD conference with a formal Indigenous peoples caucus, something that climate and biodiversity meetings still lack. Ibrahim described the gathering as “unique, historic, and particular,” and the U.N.'s International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists has helped focus attention on the value of mobile herding. But the recognition has not come without resistance. During the first week of the conference, Ibrahim helped lead a protest calling for the caucus to be given full participation and official functions.
The tensions inside the conference reflect those facing pastoralists at home. Mongolia, the host country, has a large pastoral population: about a third of its people practice pastoral lifestyles. Yet few of them have a voice in global climate talks. Elsewhere, governments have sometimes answered drought and degraded land by restricting herd sizes and limiting seasonal movement. The scientific evidence points the other way: mobile grazing can restore soils, protect biodiversity and make landscapes more resilient to extreme heat and drought.
Still, Ibrahim is careful not to romanticize traditional knowledge. In Chad, she said, the desert is advancing about two kilometers, or 1.2 miles, every year. “We have the land degradation very, very fast, and of course we use our knowledge to try to restore the land,” she said. “We try to fix it, but it is still there.”
That is why pastoralist leaders are pairing cultural arguments with a legal one. Solange Bandiaky-Badji, coordinator and president of the Rights and Resources Initiative, a global coalition of more than 200 organizations, said securing land and mobility rights is a core part of building climate resilience. “Securing land and mobility rights is not separate from climate adaptation,” she said. “It is a fundamental part of building resilience.”
Bandiaky-Badji also called for stronger enforcement of free, prior and informed consent, the principle that Indigenous peoples must have a say in decisions affecting their lands and waters. Because pastoralists are mobile, their land rights are often unrecognized, and their leaders are frequently left out of agreements over projects that change the places they depend on.
Ibrahim and Bandiaky-Badji both said climate and biodiversity summits should follow the UNCCD's example by creating formal space for Indigenous peoples. But their broader point is that desertification can no longer be treated as a separate or secondary problem. “There is a link between climate resilience, protecting biodiversity, and restoring landscapes,” Bandiaky-Badji said. “They're all interrelated. And until we start seeing them as interrelated, we might have these different COPs, but it will not really solve the systemic problem that we have been dealing with. And the climate crisis is a systemic problem that we need to deal with.”