Securing the environmental services of mobile pastoralism: policy and investment options

摘要

Livestock production plays a role in preserving wildlife and biodiversity, maintaining soil fertility and nutrient cycling, and in generating amenity value of the rangelands for other users (Mearns 1996) and livestock have multiple beneficial impacts on rangeland environments and pasture quality, raising primary pasture productivity and forage quality ( McNaughton 1979, Walker et al.1989).Mobile pastoralism is highly adapted to the environmental variability of arid lands and pastoralists use a wide variety of adaptive mechanisms to manage the risks that are implicit in such environments (Spencer 1973, Dyson‐ Hudson 1966, Bovin and Manger 1990 ).Such mechanisms are supported with elaborate land‐use strategies for conserving natural resources, such as managed grazing regimes, stocking regulations and pasture conservation in many pastoralist societies (Ruttan and Borgerhoff Mulder 1999).Although pastoralism arose in evolutionary terms relatively recently, pastoralist land management and herding strategies have also modified many rangeland ecosystems and removing pastoralism now can be detrimental to grazing ungulates and rangeland biodiversity ( Lamprey and Waller 1990 ).Where degradation of pastoral lands occurs it is frequently an outcome not of overstocking, but poor management brought about by constraints to pastoralist customary institutions and the application of traditional management practices, and in particular constraints to livestock movement and the imposition of fixed stocking rates (Niamir Fuller 1999, Behnke et al.1993).