Paper short abstract:

Based on extensive fieldwork in a pastoral community of North Eastern Tibet, this paper explores the practice-embodied ways in which herders know about climate and ecological change and respond to its impacts on their livelihoods.

Paper long abstract:

The alpine meadows of the Tibetan plateau provide critical ecosystem services both at local and global scales. In the plateau, where pastoralism has been the predominant land use for millennia, the meadows supply forage to the livestock on which pastoralists depend. On a larger scale, the alpine meadows sequester a significant proportion of the region's carbon, thus playing an important role in the global carbon cycle. However, the warming effect of climate change, combined with current grassland policies restricting livestock grazing, may threaten the ecosystem's ability to continue fulfilling these and other roles (Hopping et al. 2018). Increases in temperature have been observed to date, and climate change is expected to be several times greater in the plateau than the global mean (IPCC, 2007).

Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in a pastoral community of North Eastern Tibet from 2016 to 2018, this paper presents local herders' understandings and responses to climate and ecological change. Through observations of vegetation, soil and livestock condition, as well as weather patterns, pastoralists produce a form of knowledge about climate that is embedded in their herding practice. These observations, together with other non-environmental factors, inform household decision-making on livestock and land management. Herders' responses to their changing environments and livelihoods are discussed in relation to the local impacts of climate change as well as the current context of increasingly rigid allocation of land use rights, pasture management policies targeted at reducing grazing, and intense marketisation of economy.