Climate change is predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with the greatest potential effects on subsistence-oriented societies. On the Tibetan Plateau, extreme spring snowstorms are reportedly becoming more frequent and severe. The snowstorms of 1998, in which millions of livestock perished, were particularly devastating. For the first time, the Chinese government called for emergency food relief for the herders, and implemented an immediate livestock restocking effort. The overall goal of this project is to investigate the social and ecological implications of both the snowstorms and the state restocking programs, and more broadly, pastoralists' changing vulnerability to climate change. The interdisciplinary research team will draw on both climate impact analyses and vulnerability assessments to investigate how socio-economic status, ecological range condition, and state restocking programs affect herder well-being and vulnerability to severe spring snowstorms. This will be based on pre-1998 storm, immediate post-1998 storm, and contemporary data. Study methods will include interviews, participant observation, ecological field experiments, remote sensing, and climate analyses. Based on these findings, investigators will parameterize and run a coupled agent-based and ecosystem model to assess herder well-being and vulnerability to extreme storms under a suite of snowstorm frequency/intensities, management styles, and state policies. The researchers hypothesize that socioeconomic differentiation, links to regional markets, and grassland management strategies will be the main factors associated with vulnerability to snowstorms. They further hypothesize that the ecological and socio-economic changes which result from restocking will negatively affect herder well-being in the longer-term; however, herders from wetter versus drier Tibetan grassland regions will experience differing vulnerabilities. Results from this project will elucidate what ecological and socio-political features enhance or reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events under environmental and political change. Research results will also highlight important interactions and feedbacks between the coupled human-environment system under global change.
This project involves an international, multi-cultural, multi-lingual team of American, Chinese, and Tibetan assistants, graduate students, and both junior and senior researchers. It brings together experts in the fields of ecology, computer science, animal science, remote sensing, anthropology, geography, and political ecology. By conducting both detailed, ethnographic work and rigorous ecological experiments, at a level of detail not usually found in integrated human-ecological studies, and using both as inputs to integrative modeling, this project employs a comprehensive approach to understanding the dynamics of human and social dynamics under global change. This project provides academic training for U.S., Chinese, and Tibetan students. Based on their experiences conducting this project, the lead researchers will teach a course entitled 'Interdisciplinary Research in the Environmental Sciences' at Colorado State University, to educate and inform students about how to successfully conduct interdisciplinary research. Given the immediate policy relevance of this project, the researchers will communicate project findings to policy makers and development personnel working in China through two project stakeholder workshops. Results from this research will enhance understanding of vulnerability and livelihood of marginalized populations to political-economic and climatic change.
Despite the biophysical, hydrological and cultural importance of the Tibetan Plateau, which is warming faster than the global average, data are sparse and an understanding of human-environment interactions is lacking. In this interdisciplinary project, we investigated interactions between several expected effects of climate change and grassland management policies on ecosystems and livelihoods of herders of the central Tibetan Plateau. We conducted a fully factorial ecological experiment to study how warming and the addition of spring snow, expected to increase in the form of more frequent and severe snowstorms, interact with grazing by yaks and pikas. We complemented this with sampling of vegetation and ecosystem carbon fluxes across the landscape beyond our experiment, and with analysis of land cover change using remote sensing data. We conducted extensive household surveys of climate and ecological change, and social networks, in our experimental region, and also interviewed Tibetans across a 7000 km2 area of Nagchu Prefecture of China’s Tibet Autonomous Region about impacts of snowstorms, pastoral decision-making, and knowledge of ecological and climate change. We also conducted interviews with 120 households in three counties to study factors that contribute to vulnerability to climate change. Finally, we used a coupled ecosystem-household decision-making model to understand how future climate change and policy scenarios are likely to affect ecological condition and livelihoods. Through project findings, we are contributing to scientific advancement and to understanding human-environmental systems under global change. Project results also have immediate and broad-scale implications for pastoral development and conservation policies for the Tibetan Plateau. Our findings have demonstrated the critical role that soil moisture plays in controlling plant community and ecosystem processes in central Tibet. Much of the literature on alpine ecosystems focuses on the direct effects of temperature and many models show increased production with warming in alpine areas. However, our work demonstrates that warming introduces soil moisture stress, which alters plant physiology and available nitrogen and impacts plant community, phenological, and ecosystem processes. Our results show that warming has undesirable impacts on alpine meadow ecosystems, decreasing the cover and height and delaying the flowering phenology of the dominant species, Kobresia pygmaea, which is also the preferred forage for yaks, and increasing the biomass of shrubs. The system also stores less carbon under warmed conditions. Rather than clipping plants to simulate grazing, we work with herders to have yaks graze on selected plots within our experiment. Our work contributes to understanding herbivore-ecosystem interactions by showing that moderate grazing by yaks, in contrast to effects of warming, increases soil nitrogen and forage quality for livestock and wildlife. Importantly, yak grazing can mitigate some of the undesirable effects of warming, strongly suggesting that current policies to remove herders and grazers from the grasslands are not adaptive for climate change and will have the opposite of their intended effects. Our work illustrates that Tibetans have knowledge about climate and ecological change that can contribute to their own climate adaptation strategies and also aid in climate adaptation policy-making. Local knowledge of climate and ecological change in central Tibet supported the finding of a warming-induced delayed start of summer, a finding that has been subject to vigorous debate based on Western scientific data. We demonstrate that local knowledge can advance Western science and contribute to its debates. We further suggest that research on climate change, and climate adaptation policy-making, will benefit from careful, contextual dialogue with local observations, focusing on observable biophysical phenomena that are affected by climate and are important to livelihoods. Our qualitative study of vulnerability shows that despite current government efforts to reduce vulnerability, these have not had their desired effect because of other broader development and environment policies on the Tibetan Plateau that have inhibited herders’ coping strategies, increased their reliance upon the state, and increased vulnerability to livestock loss from snowstorms. Our work identifies the important, but often overlooked, role of political and economic drivers in climate change coping and adaptation. The coupled model shows the importance of understanding the interactions of climate change with and on ecosystem and human well-being, and that projected increases in snowstorm frequency may have significant, negative consequences for pastoral livelihoods. This project has entailed a high level of collaboration among U.S., Tibetan and Chinese interdisciplinary researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and pastoralists. We have disseminated our research results to local Tibetan herders; the academic community at international meetings; to the public in venues that include New York and San Francisco; to elementary and middle school students, undergraduate students, and secondary school teachers in the U.S.; and to key policy-makers in China. We have publicized our work through peer-review publications and via diverse media, including radio, a Chinese-English website, an online infographic, and blog posts. We have also developed and tested a climate change and rangelands undergraduate curriculum module that draws on a case study from our project.
