From the 7th to the 9th October 2024, a workshop entitled “Developing pastoralism indicators that serve the past, present and future“ was held at Campus Coupure, University of Ghent, Belgium, under the IUBS project “Pastoralism as a global herbivory socio-ecosystem”. The workshop was attended by 16 participants from Belgium, France, Mongolia, Hungary, Tanzania, Peru, Uganda, Spain, India, the United States, and Uruguay. The main topics to discuss was to analyze existing sustainability indicators, and their role in the TAPE tool of FAO, to test for their applicability in pastoralist settings and systems, for policy development via systematic data collection and verification. The workshop found that the definition of agroecology, commonly used for defining sustainability in food systems, and the indicators used in the field, have been designed from and adapted to sedentary systems. The realities of mobile livelihoods including hunter-gatherers, sea nomads and, of course, pastoralists are not captured in such indicators. the international team gathered by the workshop will adapt the indices and criteria used in the TAPE tool, and apply it to data gathering in different pastoralist settings, making a proof of concept for better evaluation of pastoralist sustainability.
Learn more about the triennial project “Pastoralism as a global herbivory socio-ecosystem”