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AbstractCommunity‐level actions addressing anthropogenic climate change are paramount to survival. However, there are limitations to the current binary approach which considers adaptation and mitigation as mutually exclusive actions. Drawing from research in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, this commentary demonstrates: (a) Indigenous knowledge, emerging from a deep connectivity to habitat, cumulative over generations, and empirically‐based, is the foundation of ecological calendars; (b) ecological calendars build anticipatory capacity, the ability to envision possible and sustainable futures, for anthropogenic climate change; and (c) this anticipatory approach engages adaptive and mitigative actions to climate change working in tandem to ensure wellbeing and food security. This paper maintains that the adaptation‐mitigation continuum involves foresight and action today in preparation for future change. Furthermore, context‐specific ecological calendars represent an effective mechanism for communities to build and retain knowledge across generations and deep connections to their habitat. Finally, further modeling needs to be undertaken with participation and leadership from Indigenous and rural communities to understand how they use the adaptation‐mitigation continuum for anticipatory action to develop multiple optimal solutions to address environmental change.

This edited volume summarizes information about the situational context, threats, problems, challenges and solutions for sustainable pastoralism at a global scale. The book has four goals. The first goal is to summarize the information about the history, distribution and patterns of pastoralism and to identify the importance of pastoralism from social, economic and environmental perspectives. The results of an empirical investigation of the environmental and socio-economic implications of pastoralism in representative pastoral regions in the world are also incorporated. The second goal is to argue that breaking coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism leads to degradation of pastoral ecosystems and to create an analysis framework to assess the vulnerability of worldwide pastoralism. Our analysis framework provides approaches to help comprehensively understand the transitions and the impacts of human-natural systems in the pastoral regions in the world. The third goal is to identify the successful models in promoting coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism, and to learn lessons of breaking coupled human-cultural pastoralism systems through examining the representative cases in regions including Central Asia, Southern and Eastern Asia, Northern and Eastern Africa, the European Alps and South America. The fourth goal is to identify the strategies to build the resilience of the coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism worldwide. We hope that our book can facilitate the further examination of sustainable development of coupled human-natural systems of pastoralism by providing the summaries of existing data and information related to the pastoralism development, and by offering a framework for better understanding and analysis of their social, economic and environmental implications

Subjective risk perceptions give rise to unique policy implications as they reflect both the expectation of risk exposure and the ability to mitigate or cope with the adverse impacts. Based on data collected from semistructured interviews and iterative ranking exercises with 159 households in the Altay and Tianshan Mountains of Xinjiang, China, this study investigates and explains the risks with respect to a seriously understudied population and location. Using both geostatistical and econometric methods, we show that although fear of environmental crisis is prevalent among our respondents, recently implemented pastoral conservation, sedentarization, and development projects are more likely to be ranked as the top concerns among affected households. In order to reduce these concerns, future pastoral policy must be built on the livestock economy, and intervention priority should be given to the geographic areas identified as risk hot spots. In cases where pastoralists have to give up their pastures, the transition to other comparable livelihood strategies must be enabled by creating new opportunities and training pastoralists to acquire the needed skills.

The first Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found widespread, accelerating declines in Earth's biodiversity and associated benefits to people from nature. Addressing these trends will require science-based policy responses to reduce impacts, especially at national to local scales. Effective scaling of science-policy efforts, driven by global and national assessments, is a major challenge for turning assessment into action and will require unprecedented commitment by scientists to engage with communities of policy and practice. Fulfillment of science's social contract with society, and with nature, will require strong institutional support for scientists' participation in activities that transcend conventional research and publication. ; National Science Foundation (NSF): DBI-1415669. Chilean government agency 'National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research' (CONICYT): AFB170008. National Climate Adaptation Science Center (US Geological Survey).