Extensive livestock use can enhance biodiversity and support species conservation in multiple ways. Mobile pastoral systems can create bio-corridors through transhumance routes and disperse seeds, enhancing biodiversity across landscapes, for example. Mobile livestock also create fertile hotspots across rangelands, and livestock grazing is essential in reducing fire loads in vulnerable ecosystems.

In recent years there have been devastating wildfires across the world. Wildfire incidence is increasing with climate change, and wildfires are predicted to increase by 50% by the end of the centuryi . Such intense, uncontrolled wildfires are massively damaging to environments and to people, involving multiple deaths – including among firefighters - and widespread destruction of property.

Debates about the role of livestock in wider landscapes have come into sharp focus around the idea of ‘rewilding’, linked to plans for ‘ecosystem restoration’. Rewilding Britain defines rewilding as “the large-scale restoration of ecosystems to the point where nature is allowed to take care of itself. Rewilding seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing speciesi .” The big question, though, is: what is ‘natural’ and what is defined as ‘missing’, over what timescale?

Pastoralists and other livestock keepers are too often pitted against conservationists. Parks are sometimes created to keep livestock and people out, and there are frequent stories in the media about pastoralists invading conservation areas during drought, sometimes resulting in conflict and violence. Pastoralism is of course not compatible with a style of conservation that encloses and excludes, but extensive livestock-keeping can be central to more people-centred conservation approaches. 

Pourtant, ces élevages ont été longtemps en marge des efforts d’investissement en agriculture. Ils disposent cependant d’atouts indéniables pour répondre à ces ODD en interaction avec d’autres formes d’élevage présentes dans les territoires. Mais ils font face aussi à un ensemble de contraintes qui remettent en question leur pérennité.

La synthèse interdisciplinaire présentée ici vise à répondre à trois questions essentielles :

Recommandations pour les facilitateur.rice.s des champs-écoles, concepteur.rice.s et responsables de projet de développement agricole

The relationship between livestock production and climate change is the subject of hot debate, with arguments for major shifts in diets and a reduction in livestockproduction. This Perspective examines how global assessments of livestock-derived methane emissions are framed, identifying assumptions and data gaps that influence standard life-cycle analysis approaches.

Au Sénégal, où 80 % de la production est fournie par les petites exploitations agricoles, l’agriculture et l’élevage constituent les principaux secteurs d’activité économique du pays. Or, le Sénégal est très vulnérable au changement climatique, à la dégradation des sols et à l’insécurité alimentaire et nutritionnelle, et bien que développant des stratégies d’adaptation en vue de renforcer leur résilience individuelle et sociale, les agriculteurs sont durement touchés par l’ensemble de ces facteurs.

Key Messages and Recommendations

• Combating desertification and land degradation while mitigating the effects of drought can secure long-term socio-economic benefits for people living in drylands and reduce their vulnerability to climate change.

• Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is an approach that counterbalances the expected loss of productive land with the recovery of degraded areas.

• Land tenure insecurity, especially for women, often prevents farmers from adopting sustainable land management practices

Climate warming threatens the future sustainability of mountains, and tropical mountains are particularly threatened with loss of biodiversity and associated ecosystem services. Conservation biologists increasingly turn to habitat suitability models to guide the establishment and assessment of protected area networks to protect the highest number of species, yet this focus often neglects the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the people living around protected areas.

The Shashamane rural district was selected as a target area and corridor of large-scale agriculture investment (LSAI) to produce surplus agricultural products and ensure local development by the state and private (domestic and foreign) investors. Shalo–Melega private LSAI projects started operation in 2008 in the Shashamane rural district. This farm project comprises a crop production site, construction of a road, a crop storage facility, and developing irrigation in a total of about 24,710.51 acres of land along the central Rift Valley basin, for long-term leases.

An efficient, convenient, and accurate method for monitoring the distribution characteristics of soil salinity is required to effectively control the damage of saline soil to the land environment and maintain a virtuous cycle of the ecological environment. There are still problems with single-monitoring data that cannot meet the requirements of different regional scales and accuracy, including inconsistent band reflectance between multi-source sensor data.