Abstract
Accelerated climate change is a global challenge that is increasingly putting pressure on the sustainability of livestock production systems that heavily depend on rangeland ecosystems. Rangeland management practices have low potential to sequester greenhouse gases. However, mismanagement of rangelands and their conversion into ex-urban, urban, and industrial landscapes can significantly exacerbate the climate change process. Under conditions of more droughts, heat waves, and other extreme weather events, management of risks (climate, biological, financial, political) will probably be more important to the sustainability of ranching than capability to expand output of livestock products in response to rising demand due to population growth. Replacing traditional domestic livestock with a combination of highly adapted livestock and game animals valued for both hunting and meat may be the best strategy on many arid rangelands. Eventually, traditional ranching could become financially unsound across large areas if climate change is not adequately addressed. Rangeland policy, management, and research will need to be heavily focused on the climate change problem.
Highlights
The climatic volatility currently in progress involving global warming and increased extreme weather events will undoubtedly have major impacts on world rangelands and rangeland users over the decade and beyond [1,2]
The main objective of this paper is to provide a current review of the linkages between rangelands, ranching, and climate change
Rangeland livestock producers will benefit from a major increase in demand and prices for meat and other livestock products
Summary
The climatic volatility currently in progress involving global warming and increased extreme weather events will undoubtedly have major impacts on world rangelands and rangeland users over the decade and beyond [1,2]. While there is global agreement on the immediate need to significantly reduce GHG emissions, climate change is a “tragedy of the commons” issue (see [16]) at the highest level in which no single country benefits from its own actions to limit GHG emissions as long as other countries are unrestricted in their emissions through enforced international agreements This is applicable to the need to address the sustainability of rangeland production systems collectively due to their large spatial extent. Rangelands can and do play a significant role in climate change processes through a combination of factors that involve grazing ruminant GHG emissions, grazing ruminant management, shifts in landscape vegetation, sites for economic developments (subdivisions), sites for energy developments, and sites for carbon sequestration. Taxes on fossil fuels were a commonly recommended means of funding financial incentives for tropical rain forest protection
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