DISES: Co-producing knowledge to sustain pastoral socio-environmental systems: System feedbacks, future scenarios, and adaptive responses

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Thriving family farms are critical to feeding the world, sustaining vibrant cultures, and protecting the environment, but they are under threat. In most regions, farms are being abandoned as children choose alternate careers due to increasing economic pressures, a changing climate, new pest and weed challenges, and shifting ideas of what constitutes a viable livelihood.

There is an urgent need to understand the factors and relationships that allow pastoral systems to adapt to changing conditions and what factors allow small-scale farming to remain resilient in certain socio-environmental contexts. This project examines the complex linkages between climate, land management, landscape, and policy to learn how we can best support healthy pastoral systems through policy or other interventions.

This project integrates social science, climate science, and plant and soil sciences to understand what variables are most likely to sustain small-scale pastoral systems. The team includes local farmers as equal partners in the work.

Pastoral landscapes are complex socio-environmental systems (SES) in which the natural components of the system both support human livelihoods and culture and require human intervention for their continued existence. They cover almost 60% of the global landmass and may support as many as 500 million people. They are, however, facing increasing challenges, most notably climate change and declining interest in farming among youth.

These challenges underscore the urgent need to understand the factors and relationships that support the ability of pastoral systems to adapt to changing conditions. This project explores a longstanding pastoral system that is an ideal setting for addressing these gaps in knowledge. Livestock grazing and human use of fire over thousands of years have created productive high-elevation meadows that support biodiversity and other ecosystem services, as well as human livelihoods and vibrant cultural practices related to pastoralism.

Though subject to many of the same pressures confronting other pastoral systems, this SES has remained relatively robust over time, with one of the highest rates of new farmer installations in Europe. The overarching goals of this project are a) to understand the relationship among factors that influence farm transmission, continuity of pastoral practice, and the resilience of this landscape and its ecosystem functions, and b) to develop a process for the co-production of socio-environmental knowledge with pastoralists that improves scientific knowledge and strengthens local governance institutions.

This research will address those goals by accomplishing two research objectives: 1) characterize the pastoral SES by measuring constituent environmental and social components, determining the historic and current controls on the system, and modeling relationships between system elements; and 2) analyze and model future changes in the system by integrating long-term socio-environmental data collection with climate and policy forecasts. This research builds on, and continues, collaborative transdisciplinary research that integrates local residents as full partners in the co-production of knowledge on pastoral system sustainability.

Pastoralists have been full partners in the design and development of this proposed research since its inception.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.