Testing the impact of environmental hazards and violent conflicts on sustainable pastoral development: micro-level evidence from Nigeria

Pastoralism is often associated with a particular group of people or ethnic group whose livelihoods are mainly based on livestock production in the rangelands. With changing climatic conditions as a driving force of desertification and the mounting pressure on land due to population growth, the livestock-based livelihood strategy of pastoralism is rapidly becoming unsustainable. This study examines the impact of environmental hazards and violent conflicts on pastoral sustainability. The analysis using instrumental variable regression revealed two key findings. First, hazards and violent conflicts have strong negative effects on livestock holding. These effects can be found across all pastoral households with various sizes of livestock holding. Second, the loss of livestock is negatively affecting some critical indicators of welfare, such as income and per capita expenditure. In this sense, reducing both environmental hazards and violent conflicts is key to sustainable pastoral development. While there is a need to incorporate pastoral sustainability into the sustainable environment agenda, sustainable pastoral development not only depends on the pace but how effectively anti-climatic change, rural policing, poverty reduction and rangeland management policies are implemented.