Efforts to ensure sustainable peace can help to support access to safe, reliable and affordable energy in the long term. Energy access in turn can help to reduce conflict due to specific food security and livelihood benefits, such as the ability to safely cook food and carry out income-generating activities. An in-depth analysis of context-specific conflict drivers is a necessary first step in working towards sustainable peace.

Changes in climate that intensify drought and accelerate the spread of livestock parasites and diseases darken the economic future for sub-Saharan pastoralists. Already stressed, as industrial and urban development narrow their access to pastures and water for their animals, many pastoralists face a bleak choice: abandon their livestock and their cultural heritage or die. In Uganda, however, the outlook for pastoralists is becoming much brighter. Thousands of pastoralists in Uganda point the way toward a better option: commercial milk production.

Index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) is a donor-funded programme aimed at designing, developing and implementing market-mediated, index-based insurance products to protect livestock keepers, particularly in the drought-prone arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), from drought-related asset losses. The IBLI index is based on satellite data, which measure the quality of the pastureland every 10–16 days. These data are inputs to a statistical model of livestock mortality developed using historical data from the region.

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security explicitly mention pastoralists as users of the Guidelines and as targets of capacity building. Despite the historical and often ongoing marginalization of pastoralists, this technical guide has been developed in response to emerging opportunities to support pastoralists and to strengthen their land and resource rights.

The interface between environment and conflict has gained traction in policy and security circles in recent times. Growing scholarly interest on the linkage stems from increasing awareness on the role climate change plays in precipitating resource contestations and conflict over depleting natural resources, particularly in poor regions. Such impacts sometimes result from secondary consequences of environmental decline and resources scarcity which give rise to stiff competitions over access to available resources.

Pastoralists in Isiolo county in northern Kenya feel under siege;with their way of life under threat. Isiolo has been the home of the Waso Boran pastoralists for many decades;but attacks from neighbouring Somali herders;encroachments by agriculturalists from Meru;expansion of conservancies and planned road;pipeline and resort city mega-projects are affecting all pastoral livelihoods;creating many new risks and environmental uncertainties. Droughts are occurring more frequently. Market uncertainties are important;regarding access to milk;meat and live animals.

Available evidence indicates that pastoral destitution in Ethiopia is principally driven by feed and water scarcity. Feed resources ought to be considered in the broader perspective and not predominantly during emergency as is the case now. Feed inventory and balance is therefore requisite such that the country is aware of its needs, resource availability, gaps, implications and how the gap can be filled within the country. This will make feed interventions in the country effective in the immediate, medium and long term as well as provide solutions for replication in the region.

Pastoral livestock production is crucial to the livelihoods and the economy of Africa’s semiarid regions. It developed 7,000 years ago in response to long-tern climate change. It spread throughout Northern Africa as an adaptation to the rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable arid climate. It is practiced in an area representing 43% of Africa’s land mass in the different regions of Africa, and in some regions it represents the dominant livelihoods system.

In January 2018, the Rangelands Association of Kenya and ILRI partnered to host the Rangeland Communities Exchange Conference. ILRI’s support to the conference was undertaken through the 'Restoration of degraded land for food security and poverty reduction in East Africa and the Sahel: Taking successes in land restoration to scale' project. The conference facilitated community-to-community exchange of knowledge on rangeland management practices and on the ways in which management and governance frameworks interact with these practices.