ONE of the world’s most ancient activities, nomadic grazing, has been re-emerging as a vital part of the strategy for coping with the impact of climate change in the world’s desert regions and rangelands.
Researchers with the Desert Knowledge CRC (DKCRC) say that mobility is becoming an increasingly important way of coping with climate variability in arid zone livestock enterprises, both in Australia and worldwide.
“Deserts and rangelands are highly variable and, to cope with this, those who live in them have to have strategies to manage their risk, both in time and space,” says Dr Ryan McAllister of DKCRC and CSIRO.
“However, the tendency worldwide in the last century or so has been to carve up the rangelands into smaller and smaller properties, privatising and fragmenting them.
"This process of intensification has led to degradation – with the rangelands often being grazed unsustainably when dry years come.”
However, Australian pastoralists have responded by trying to recapture some of their former flexibility, using road trains to move stock hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres, to agist them where the grazing can support them and give the dry country a chance to recover, he says.
“This is a form of nomadism that is good for the stock and good for the landscape – but in many countries, sadly, the trend is still the other way, towards fragmenting, which creates economic pressure to overgraze the dry country.”
At the heart of nomadism is the ability of a community to co-operate in sharing a common resource, often using time-honoured traditions to prevent it from being abused or exploited by individuals.
“We need to re-learn that spirit of co-operation which some of the old nomadic societies still practice – and we need to understand how fragmenting the rangelands leads to their destruction through the economic imperative to get as much as you can from a limited area of land in a highly erratic climate,” he says.
The need is all the more urgent because of the vast extent of the rangelands and their ability to play a vital role in overcoming climate change by locking up large amounts of carbon.
To achieve this, however, rangelands must be grazed far more flexibly, with stock being moved to allow the pasture to rest and recover and, in turn, lock up carbon.
“If nomadism is done properly, the country recovers. It flourishes and that allows more carbon to be stored in the soils,” Dr McAllister says.
“Nomadism has been an important human social institution for tens of thousands of years – far longer than we have had agriculture, settlements or cities – and it is time we relearned its value and its wisdom."
In a new journal article to be published in the inaugural edition of Pastoralism - Research, Policy and Practice, Dr McAllister argues that when nomads settle down in towns and communities, they still need the flexibility which nomadism provides to cope with the huge variability expected under global climate change.
“We need a new system which enables nomads to enjoy the benefits of a settled community, while at the same time being able to keep their livestock on the move to avoid overgrazing, and to manage the arid country so it can flourish again," he says.
The system of agistment which emerged in Australia can help to avoid the impact of over-intensification in the pastoral country by trucking stock long distances.
This offers a worldwide model for how to respond to climate variability.
“Mobility, or nomadism, isn’t the only way that dryland people cope with the intense variability of the place they live. But is a very important strategy – and it needs to be encouraged along with those that allow flexibility in time as well as space, such as financial instruments which enable the pastoralist to store money or conserve fodder in the good times for use in the bad,” Dr McAllister says.
He points out that mobility has been a time-honoured tactic for all forms of desert life to respond to the challenge of extremes of climate and resources.
“Desert animals and even plants manage to migrate from one place to a more favourable one," Dr McAllister says.
"Wild animal herds move all the time, never overgrazing the pasture if they can avoid it. Aboriginal society is founded on mobility, because that is what makes the most sense in a desert."
While modern pastoralists can manage climate variability using new tools like supplementary feeding, rotational grazing and off-farm income sources, in these highly variable environments the costs of not spreading resource use across space are great.
“The challenge for policymakers is to find ways to deliver the benefits of modern society to nomadic people without impairing their ability to move.
"There are many technologies for delivering education, healthcare and other services which now allow this to happen. It is very important that policymakers start to support mobility in the dry regions.”
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