Rangelands are complex productive landscapes and the most extensive natural land cover type on the planet.

They are typically defined by a combination of land use and land cover, and occur in variable and sometimes harsh climates. Rangelands support diverse ecosystems – from open canopy grasslands to woodlands, deserts and tundra – that are suitable for browsing and grazing of domesticated livestock and wildlife.

Globally, rangelands store vast amounts of carbon and provide habitat for biodiversity. They serve as freshwater catchment areas for rivers and wetlands, and they provide cultural and economic support for billions of people.

A snapshot from the Rangeland Atlas.

Extensive farming of livestock, especially cattle, goats and sheep, in rangelands and grasslands provides people with meat, milk, wool and leather. Livestock are also important for the work that they do, assisting farmers with transportation and traction, cultivation and fertilisation of garden plots.

As herds move across the landscape, the presence of livestock can help maintain healthy ecological communities and maintain habitat for biodiversity by increasing the organic matter in soils.

Well managed grazing and resting cycles, for example, can increase the rate of nutrient cycling, thus improving soil organic matter and nutrient availability to vegetation. Poorly managed grazing, on the other hand, can reduce plant cover, increase soil loss and result in soil compaction, which means less organic matter in the soil and less availability of nutrients.

Rangelands make up more than half of the land area in Sub-Saharan Africa. They are diverse, ranging from temperate grasslands and savannahs to woodlands, wetlands, drylands and deserts. They support the livelihoods, wellbeing and resilience of communities across the continent.

Rangelands in Southern Africa are shaped by both social and natural processes, and are often governed communally, through locally organised informal institutions, and used collectively.

Extensive, or small-scale, livestock farming on communally governed rangelands is the backbone of vast informal agrarian socio-economies, which provide social, economic, cultural and environmental values and benefits to livestock farmers and broader populations.

Despite this, agricultural policies often neglect or misunderstand existing communal governance systems, informality and the dynamic nature of rangeland ecologies. They often do not take account of the situated local knowledge and motivations of farmers and their communities that inform and shape adaptation and change in extensive livestock farming systems.

Instead, agricultural policies tend to be biased toward commercial farming systems and formal value chains for meat, milk and other livestock products.

In the early twentieth century, this led to prescriptions for livestock farming systems focused on private property, fenced camps, and conservative stocking rates.

These ideas have become dogma and institutionalised in national policies and provide the standard against which communally governed rangelands are frequently misjudged to be spaces of ‘problems without solutions’ – ungoverned, overstocked, inefficiently used, and ultimately degraded.

Subsequent development policy and rangeland management approaches have often sought to address the problem of land degradation through the control of livestock numbers, based on theoretical models of equilibrium, carrying capacity and assumptions about the impact of livestock grazing on plant succession. These can be a mis-match to the contextual realities, challenges and changes faced by extensive livestock farmers and adaptive management practices that have evolved over time.

More recent research has shown that such biases and received wisdoms can lead to misrecognition of drivers of landscape change. They can mask potential ways of addressing them in the face of emerging policy debates about biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and sustainable development.

This can create major problems for communal farmers, broader communities and policy makers, as strategies that have developed in response to past processes of political and environmental change and climate variability may not be sufficient to maintain resilience in the face of escalating and uncertain climate impacts.

Southern African rangelands and extensive livestock production systems provide a wide range of social, cultural, economic and ecological values and benefits to people and wildlife. But they face increasing risk and uncertainty from intersecting forms of political and environmental change and shifting policy priorities.

For example, communal rangelands make up 13% of South Africa’s agricultural land. With more land coming under some form of communal land use as a result of land reform, rangeland commons cover a significant (and growing) proportion of South Africa’s land surface. This increases the potential for contestation among different groups with contrasting priorities and differing degrees of social and political power.

In the context of rapid change, environmental hazards can intersect with and intensify social exclusions and vulnerabilities. These are rooted in, and shaped by, structural factors and unjust policy processes, including continuing legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, that impact patterns of land use and land distribution, market access and contestations around resource governance. The links between environmental hazards and social exclusions carry important implications and lessons for climate adaptation and resilience in the short, medium and long-term.