Are world’s 200 million pastoral herders a climate threat?

In early 2020, just before the world locked down, I was in Ethiopia as a journalist, documenting the challenges faced by a tribe of nomadic pastoralists that has made its home in the Danakil Desert for over 1,000 years.

About 1.5 million Afar tribespeople migrate across an area larger than Ireland with their camels, cattle, sheep, and goats to wherever grass happens to be growing at any given time. They increasingly face persistent drought and rising temperatures.

Today, their way of life is also coming under pressure in some quarters as a contributor to the global climate crisis, due to the methane emissions of their herds compared with newer livestock methods. 

Some scientists, however, say there’s no environmental reason to turn away from pastoralism. “Pastoralism is basically a fossil-fuel-free, totally solar-powered production system,” said Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a co-founder of the League for Pastoral Peoples. 

Thinking back to my experiences in Ethiopia, I recall what one Afar woman told me after walking for 10 days with her cattle and donkeys in search of pasture. “I never dream of moving to town.” 

In early 2020, just before the world locked down, I was in Ethiopia as a journalist, documenting the challenges faced by a tribe of nomadic pastoralists that has made its home in the Danakil Desert for over 1,000 years. About 1.5 million Afar tribespeople migrate across an area larger than Ireland – and often called the hottest and driest place on Earth – with their camels, cattle, sheep, and goats to wherever grass happens to be growing at any given time. 

I found some of the threats to their way of life to be region-specific, such as armed conflict with an aggressive neighboring tribe and locust plagues that decimated their already scant rangelands. But some of their other, even more intractable problems are shared by the estimated 200 million pastoralists around the world – the persistent drought, rising temperatures, and unpredictable weather patterns that scientists say are hallmarks of climate change. 

“Life used to be good here. There was once so much grass, and it grew so high, that hyenas could hide in it and we couldn’t see them,” remembered Doge More, an Afar man in his 50s who didn’t know his exact age. “Now, there is no rain, so there are no grasses. We can’t keep cows anymore, and most people have very few animals at all. So what do we eat?”

Today, their way of life is under threat not only from changing conditions on the ground. Pastoralist communities are also coming under pressure in some quarters as a contributor to the global climate crisis. A December 2023 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, for example, seeks to provide “a comprehensive assessment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from livestock agrifood systems.” Some researchers say the report, in effect, suggests that pastoralism is part of the emissions problem. 

That idea may sound hard to imagine. Like other pastoralist communities I’d written about and photographed over the years – all of whom are experiencing impacts of climate change firsthand – the Afar rely little on fossil fuels. They eschew consumer culture – partly due to poverty, partly because everything they own, including their huts, must be portable.

But when researchers calculate the amount of greenhouse gasses generated by a livestock system, most compare the amount of methane and carbon dioxide that’s emitted to the amount of protein that’s produced. By that measure, animals raised by traditional pastoralists are less efficient than those raised with newer, more intensive methods, the report says. 

This is partly because indigenous breeds of livestock, well suited to their often harsh environments, are less productive than so-called improved breeds that are raised on farms. Additionally, a diet of wild grasses causes livestock to create more methane than if they eat formulated feeds.