Pastoral Commons for global sustainability

There is a strong and growing scientific and political awareness that the «commons» can be a positive regime vis-à-vis environmental conservation, local peoples’ well-being and global sustainability, which are also often described as Indigenous Peoples and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) under the umbrella of the main international environmental and development agencies (e.g. CBD, IUCN, UNEP and UNDP). It is so much so that these international organizations are now championing the promotion and protection of such systems. In fact, the study A global spatial analysis. The estimated extent of territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities  elaborated by the prestigious consortium on Indigenous People and Local Community Conserved Areas and Territories and the United Nations Environment Program with the World Conservation Monitoring Center, has estimated that up to more than one fifth of the earth’s land surface is covered by commons still today, while the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) elevates that number to 32% of the earth’s land surface, which at the same time overlaps with over 20% of the world’s Key Biodiversity Areas.

Considering this context, one of the most paradigmatic forms of communal governance of natural resources is pastoralism, most often co-sustained by collective rules of access and community management of grazing areas. It is estimated that pastoral ways of life are practiced by millions of families worldwide, ranging from individuals between 150 and 500 million, while over 50% of the Earth’s surface is linked to rangelands and to these ways of life. And they include environments as diverse as cold and dry deserts, steppes, scrublands, savannahs, flourishing meadows, mountain pastures and forests, deltas and other wetlands.

In this sense, it is important to underline that due to their global importance, the United Nations has called for the 2026 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralism, at the same time that transhumance, the move of herds between complementary rangelands, notably between highlands and lowlands but not only, that again is managed collectively by the different pastoralists using the different transhumance droves, has been recently declared as a World’s Intangible Cultural Heritage by the UNESCO.

Therefore, the two together (i.e. «pastoral commons») entail a doubly important value for biodiversity conservation and other key ecosystem services, along with other social values, cultural heritage, agro-economic potentials, legal groundings, political viability and overall global sustainability (as we pointed out, for example, in our work published in COSUST).

Pastoral commons are at the same time a natural and a cultural subject. They are ever evolving pasturelands co-produced and conserved by local populations through dynamic-adaptive community governance systems where commoners (community members’ rights holders) agree between them the rules of access and use of the territories and ecosystems on which their livelihoods and those of their families depend. These are systems that have evolved generation after generation through centenary processes of essay and error and have reached to us, proving per se their deep sustainability and resilience.

In strict agronomic terms, pastoral commons typically involve assemblies of pastoralists that after discussion and negotiation impose a total or partial limitation of access to a pastoral space or resource during a determined period. For example, in many mountain temperate areas, this can happen in spring, allowing the vegetation to rest at a particularly sensitive period and protecting the moment when the most important exponential plant growth, flowering and grain production are taking place. In this way they ensure the pastoral ecosystem’s annual renewal and sustained use year after year. At the same time, it maximizes fodder production which contributes to a greater biomass, resulting in a denser and better-preserved plant cover than in open access areas not communally managed or in intense farming areas.

Moreover, this favors thick organic soils and therefore can allow them to stock high levels of carbon against climate change, which are at the same time very stable carbon sinks, since the carbon is buried underground and protected from escaping to the atmosphere, through for example wildfires, wood cutting or peat extraction. Beyond this myriad of ecosystem services, pastoral commons also favor pools for seed conservation and diffusion, water retention and diversity of landscapes, as a diversified use of the territory with different commons opening and closing access at different moments of the year diversifies the three dimensions of biodiversity (i.e. at intraspecific, interspecific and habitat levels).

For all these reasons, it is very important that the cultural heritage of pastoral commons spread throughout all continents and particularly in Europe is increasingly taken into consideration. The whole system of pastoral commons is a paradigmatic example of tangible and intangible cultural heritage intricated with the ecosystems, where the traditional ecological knowledge of millenary cultures, the know-how in terms of negotiation and co-habitation between pastoralist communities to maintain resilient systems through time, the care between humans and between humans and other living beings, and the related beliefs and symbolic system, are deeply intertwined with a unique biological and ecological diversity that would not exist without the intangible cultural heritage of the commons that sustains it. In fact, communities governing their land collectively, generally have a strong cultural heritage and are the first interested in its sustainability, as their survival depends on the conservation of these ecosystems, to which they are deeply connected.

Nevertheless, there is scarce empiric systematic research comparatively and holistically identifying the multiple values of different pastoral commons to unveil trends and better inform policymakers about the pros and cons of such systems at social and environmental levels. And this becomes particularly flagrant in Europe where in 2013 Eurostat, the European Union’s official public statistics office, determined that more than 7% of its Utilized Agricultural Area is common land (over 9 million hectares), while there is not even a single mention to commons neither in the ongoing Common Agricultural Policy (2023-2027) nor in the EU Green Deal, or the European Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategies, and even at research level Europe is still poorly covered.

I claim that the multifaceted «invisible reality» of the European commons cannot be ignored anymore, especially considering the new EU agri-environmental targets for the achievement of the UN SDGs, and the potentials that commons have to achieve these targets.

Pablo Domínguez, environmental anthropologist at the French CNRS, based at the Laboratory of Eco-Anthropology in the Museum of Humankind (Paris), focused on agro-silvo-pastoralist systems and rural commons / sustainable community-based governance of natural resources (e.g. ICCAs – Territories of life), specially pasturelands of Mediterranean mountains, as a key element for global sustainability, political inclusivity, agro-economic potential and cultural heritage. On this topic, Pablo Domínguez coordinated in 2021 the Temporary Exhibition at the Virtual Museum of Human Ecology Territories of life on the edge. Mediterranean mountain pastoral commonss in the 21st century.