Modelling Chinese grassland systems to improve herder livelihoods and grassland sustainability

Abstract

Recent degradation of Chinese grasslands has contributed to declining herder productivity and profitability, increased incidence of dust storms and regionally reduced air quality. Overgrazing due to a doubling of stocking rates since the mid-1980s has been identified as a key contributing factor. Several pathways and strategies exist to improve grassland management; however, there remains uncertainty around the long-term sustainability of alternative systems. Nineteen years of grasslands research in China has produced a suite of models designed to improve understanding of grassland systems and investigate options for change. The StageTHREE Sustainable Grasslands Model was used to evaluate the ability of selected strategies to meet economic, production and environmental objectives. Sets of strategies that focussed on flock size, lambing and selling times, supplementary feeding rules and grazing management were simulated for a typical herder located in the desert steppe of Siziwang Banner, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. The results from the risk efficiency analysis indicated that no single strategy set clearly dominates across all objectives. Although the current practice of herders was found to be risk-efficient, it did not achieve the highest rate of grassland recovery, minimise soil erosion or minimise the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity for sheepmeat production. Targeting further improvements in these attributes could be at the detriment of herder livelihoods. The analysis indicated that if herders adopted biomass-based grazing management and improved supplementary feeding they would be able to improve grassland resilience and maintain positive long-term economic performance under reduced flock sizes. Individual decision-making units, however, would still need to trade off the importance of different attributes to identify the strategy set, or system, that best meets their objectives and attitude to risk.

Toward a sustainable grassland ecosystem worldwide

“…Considering the benefits humans obtain from grassland ecosystems, the cultural, provisioning, regulating, and supporting ecosystem services are key to establishing ecological-social system relations, and assessing grassland sustainability from a human-nature relationship perspective. 1 Most important, in addition to the above assessment, determining the sustainability of grassland ecosystem must integrate various factors such as policy and market, 5 which influence how herdsmen make decisions about using and managing grasslands via household strategies and, more broadly, community institutions.…”

Commentary: on the under-valuing of Australia’s expertise in drylands research and practice globally

“…This has created a cadre of overseas scientists with a connection to Australia, as well as huge returns on investment -for example, Vere (2005) estimated that ACIAR's investment in research into conservation tillage for dryland cropping in China generated benefits of AUD$579 million with a return on investment of 36 : 1, as well as benefits in Australia itself. This special issue reports recent projects supported by ACIAR (Kemp et al 2020;Badgery et al 2020;Behrendt et al 2020;. However, the Figure shows how R4D investment from ACIAR into countries with drylands (i.e.…”

Market Costs and Financing Options for Grassland Carbon Sequestration: Empirical and Modelling Evidence From Qinghai, China

“…The use case here requires modeling responses to management practices that are not present in the sample, which presents a challenge for econometric approaches (Jones et al, 2017). Mathematical programming models have been developed for extensive livestock systems on the basis of long-term research in Inner Mongolia (e.g., Behrendt et al, 2020). However, the lack of data to parameterize these models for livestock systems with different vegetation types and livestock species presents a challenge (Liu et al, 2020).…”

“…In terms of socioeconomic impacts, econometric methods have been used to assess the ex post impacts of these programs and provide insights into herders' behavioral responses to incentives (e.g., Hu et al, 2019;Qiu et al, 2020). More recently, bioeconomic modeling has been combined with choice modeling to enable ex ante assessment of herders' likely responses to different policies and combinations of policy measures (Li and Bennett 2019;Behrendt et al, 2020;Brown et al, 2021). However, the existing analysis has not considered the effects of herders' decision-making on grassland soil carbon sequestration.…”