Paper short abstract:

Pastoralism is still the major economy in rural Mongolia, while its conditions have been ever changing. Recently climate extremes increased and have caused devastating animal losses. This paper investigates how pastoralists respond to droughts and winter hazards by adapting their seasonal movements.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1991 pastoralists have experienced transformation processes from socialism to a market oriented economy that significantly altered the risks of herding from state cooperatives to individual households. General risk calculations mainly included animal losses caused by predators (human and animal ones), epidemics, and weather extremes. However, during the past years pastoralists have experienced droughts and winter hazards more frequently than before. Herders perceive both extreme forms of weather as interrelated and connect them to discourses of climate change and global warming. According to these discourses, local people's assumptions are that changes in climate will most likely cause more droughts and winter hazards in the future. From the herders' point of view, prospects of a rural livelihood in Mongolia have arguably changed from a situation of calculable risks to menacing uncertainty. Hence it is doubtful whether pastoralists' traditional social and economic strategies are still sufficient. As ethnographic fieldwork in Western Mongolia in 2014/15 showed, changes in seasonal migration patterns have become important strategies to adapt to extreme weather conditions. Alternative responses like increasing fodder production for winter or limiting the numbers of animals for more sustainable pasture usage were barely considered. This paper investigates under what conditions and how individual herders adapted their seasonal movements and discusses possible consequences and limitations of this strategy.