Project Aims (cont)
The reforms that are the focus of this study affect vast areas and millions of people. As a geographical feature, the Plateau stretches across the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (TAR) and parts of four adjoining provinces (Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan). The Plateau covers 1.65 million sq. km, by far the most expansive area of alpine grassland in the world, containing diverse vegetation types from desert steppe in the west to moist alpine meadow in the east, across a rainfall gradient from about 100 mm to 700 mm of average annual precipitation. The Plateau accounts for roughly half of China’s rangeland and supports about five million ethnic Tibetan pastoralists, and agropastoralists predominately from China's minority groups and representing some of the nation's poorest people.
Rangeland reform to address the apparent crisis of overgrazing is being rapidly implemented on the Plateau. Scientific research that would inform this process must operate at a scale that reflects the geographical scope at which administrators and policy makers operate. This research should also provide information in a form useful to policymakers who may not have a technical background, but are nonetheless making decisions with long-term implications regarding the protection and management of rangeland ecosystems and the welfare of millions of people.
The research programme laid out here is designed to meet these practical demands through a combination of interdisciplinary field-based research, syntheses of existing research findings, and participatory work with pastoral communities, local administrations and NGOs. The project will inform public policy by assessing whether land degradation is ameliorated by the new land tenure and grazing regimes. It will also measure the consequences of sedentarisation on pastoralists’ social and economic welfare, when pastoralists are forced to settle in rural areas or are obliged to leave the rangelands altogether and seek scarce alternative livelihoods in towns – creating a rural-to-urban population shift. The overall purpose of this research is to identify the immediate and long-term environmental, social and economic impacts of policies now being put into practice.
Specifically, this research will investigate the biophysical and socio-economic effects of fenced versus open range grazing management across several major ecological zones in the Tibetan Plateau. The Plateau provides a coherent ethnic, historical and geographical entity for comparative research. Across the Plateau, enclosure and exclusion are being implemented unevenly, with largely unmeasured consequences. Field sites, agreed between partners at the initial Project Executive meeting, will be selected in three Provinces and the Tibet Autonomous Region to represent the five main environmental conditions that characterise the Plateau as a whole - high vegetation productivity in montane and peatland rangelands, high frigid meadows with medium vegetation productivity and lastly, high arid grassland with low vegetation productivity. Each of the selected sites will contain both enclosed and open range grazing management systems, or hybrid systems that combine elements of enclosure and open access.
Our central hypothesis is that enclosure will be more prevalent and popular among pastoralists who have good access to markets and use rangelands that are intrinsically more productive. A corollary of this hypothesis is that no single system of grazing management and rangeland tenure is likely to be optimal under all conditions. Instead, it is possible that an array of different management systems will be appropriate to specific market and ecological conditions. We will therefore investigate the possibility that the most effective way to minimise rangeland degradation is to promote policies that encourage plurality and permit localised, site-specific adaptations. Participatory techniques will be employed to identify such adaptations.
We also hypothesise that grazing exclosures or strictly enforced grazing bans will be more prevalent in areas that have national rather than regional environmental significance, either because these areas represent unique conservation habitats or the upstream sources of nationally-important river systems, including the Yangtze and YellowRivers. A corollary of this hypothesis is the possibility that the extent of exclosure is correlated with the perceived off-site importance of a resource, and has little to do with on-site rates of resource degradation. To investigate this possibility, we will estimate the severity of degradation at sites that are subject to varying degrees of enforced grazing exclusion.
In testing these hypotheses, three primary scientific and technical objectives are being pursued:
Objective 1: Compare the extent and type of rangeland degradation, including biodiversity indicators for both flora and fauna, between five major ecological systems within which both enclosed and open-range grazing management is practised. This comparative analysis will establish the conditions under which enclosure and exclosure leads to rehabilitated rangeland, versus those conditions in which they do not.
Objective 2: Explore innovative approaches for rangeland rehabilitation and improved pastoral livelihoods under various systems of grazing enclosure and exclosure. The identification of these approaches will involve the participation of local pastoral communities, administrations, NGOs and other stakeholders in the study areas. Assessments of alternative management arrangements will also be informed by new data from field studies undertaken by the project, and data published in Chinese and European languages.
Objective 3: Evaluate the social, cultural and economic repercussions of changing land tenure and grazing regimes on the pastoralists concerned. Interdisciplinary field studies will compare incomes and livelihoods of pastoralist communities that are rapidly adopting new grazing regimes requiring sedentarisation, with those communities that remain engaged in semi-nomadic livestock husbandry. Through participatory methods, the project will gauge the impact of settlement on livelihoods in terms of household labour and gender roles, access to markets, employment and social services and lastly, the effects of new living situations on the pastoralists’ cultural identity.
The objectives for dissemination and co-operation with host country partners are:
Objective 4: Disseminate study results that identify environmentally sustainable policy and management options that are consistent with pastoral welfare. This will involve meetings with stake-holders – pastoralists, local government officials, NGOs, and national Chinese research institutes – throughout the project. Participative approaches will be used to encourage a dialogue among stakeholders in open discussions of the problem issues and in seeking implementation of agreed solutions.
Objective 5: Support long-term ecological monitoring of rangeland conditions by the Chinese scientific community and augment the formulation of sustainable tenure and management policies. This will be achieved through prolonged collaborations in the field, presentations and papers co-authored by Chinese and European teams, scientific exchanges at multiple scales and in several languages. The project will include cross-regional and European research opportunities for junior colleagues, and material support for research conducted by Chinese scientists.
