Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change in Pastoral Areas

The warming climate and increasing extreme weather events are transforming ecological backgrounds, which is bringing new challenges to herders’ livelihood in grassland areas. To understand the practical ecological risks and the current resilience situations of herders’ behaviors and government correspondence measures, we built a conceptual framework of community resilience in pastoral areas, selected different kinds of steppes along the ecological gradient (desert steppe, typical steppe and meadow steppe) and took household surveys to recognize the difference in ecological risks and enhancing strategies in different grassland types. The results show that: (1) Herders in desert steppe, with the lowest precipitation and the worst grassland condition, turn out to have more experience in perceiving droughts and mitigating loss from disaster, but received the most attention from government assistance (28.0%) to getting through drought; (2) Typical steppe, with traditionally better pastural husbandry environment, suffered most broadly through droughts (85.7%) and have worst household livestock loss (26.7%) through snow storms; (3) Meadow steppe has the highest catastrophic snow storm ratio (65.0%) and affected ratio (95.0%), but the least assistance from the government (22.22%). The results revealed that originally high ecological vulnerability gradually encouraged herder’s livelihood adaptive capability. However, the government assistance and attention are more inclined to the local original ecological vulnerability. In addition, the increasing extreme climate events are bringing new challenges to adaptive knowledge systems of indigenous herders under good ecological condition. There is a clear need to combine the efforts of local pastoralists, policymakers and scientific community together to construct a more resilient socio-ecological pastoral systems under the global climate change. This research provides an in-depth understanding of community resilience in pastoral areas along the ecological gradient while facing the slow-onset climate change impacts. Practical recommendations on climate risk management and adaptation in pastoral areas are discussed.