At last week’s COP28 food systems pavilion session on ‘Land, Livestock and Livelihoods – Early actions for adaptation and resilience-building from Africa’s rangelands and drylands‘, Jarso Mokku from CEO of the Drylands Learning and Capacity Building Initiative (DLCI), hosted a small group discussion around the policy issues and opportunities for drylands in East Africa.
Here he reports on key points from the discussion.
First, the impact of drought-stress, back-to-back shocks, and losses of assets and human lives is affecting the mental health of many pastoralist families. Domestic violence is on the increase. Despite this, pastoralists do not want to leave the system, they only step out to survive and look for opportunities to rebuild their lost herds and return to pastoralism. This indicates that there is no viable and sustainable alternative to pastoralism in the drylands. Pastoralism is surviving without public investment support.
Pastoralist people and pastoralism have a weak influence on power and politics. Mobility in the rangelands keeps them away from interacting with urban centers of power. Pastoralists have relatively small populations with less voting power. Pastoralist contributions to GDP, natural heritage, and taking care of large fragile territories and important resourceful ecosystems are rarely appreciated. Pastoralists are largely self-sustaining and pastoralist issues only come to attention when shocking images of stressed people along with their dying animals are reported in the media – always too late.
There is more incentive among relief and emergency humanitarian aid agencies than willing donors to support pastoralism development initiatives that can truly enable pastoralists to adapt effectively to climate change, build resilience against the shocks, and mitigate against vulnerabilities created by drought, floods, and conflicts.
In the drylands of Africa, land rights are human rights. Urgent action is required to enable pastoralists to legally secure their ancestral lands so they can continue to take care of fragile dryland ecosystems on behalf of humanity as an adaptive strategy against climate change.
Mismatches of policy action litter the pastoralist landscape and are adding to the current climate change crisis. Responding to drought stress by settling pastoralists, making it difficult for them to move around with livestock, sedentralization policies targeting pastoralists, or drylands crop farming are big policy mistakes. These are very expensive and counter-productive initiatives.
Policy-making processes often exclude pastoralist voices and policy-makers’ ways of thinking are often alien to the pastoralist realities. Policy-makers tending to just focus on a piece or part of evidence or pastoralist knowledge in isolation from the bigger picture of the pastoralism ecosystem is counter-productive.
Finally: Policym-akers must consider developing a mindset of integrated policy-making that addresses anticipatory actions about people (pastoralists), land, and livestock as one component of larger systems, and not in isolation.
Read a full report of the session.