Trends and Variability in Pastoral Resources in the West African Sahel

The geography of water and nutrients in the savannas of West Africa has shaped the development of a system of migratory cattle movements (“transhumance”) in which herds travel north during the rainy season to graze the nutritious grasslands of the Sahel and return south in the dry season to graze in fallow lands and on agricultural residue. Cattle in this system gain most of their body mass while grazing in the Sahel and frequently lose mass on their dry season range. The Sahel is, therefore, at the heart of extensive livestock production systems in West Africa. However, there is increasing concern regarding how climate change will impact the region, while human population growth and economic development require increased agricultural and livestock production. The future for pastoral production systems in West Africa is, therefore, uncertain.

This presentation combines remote sensing of vegetation structure and phenology with a watershed-scale tree-grass ecohydrology model, to explore how key resources for Sahelian pastoralist communities (forage and surface water for livestock, woody biomass for fuel) respond to climate variability and extreme events, conditioned by human management of grazing, fire and fuel-wood harvest. Mortality of woody species and loss of herbaceous cover during the Sahelian droughts of the 1970’s and 1980’s significantly perturbed vegetation dynamics and ecohydrological interactions, perturbations from which the region is still recovering. The re-greening and reforestation of the Sahel reported by many authors is, in part, an expression of this recovery. Future trajectories of change in pastoral resources in the Sahel, in particular forage availability and drinking water, are explored using climate change ensembles.