Trans-Himalayan pastoralists face unprecedented challenges due to climate change, including melting glaciers, extreme weather events, and growing nutritional and water insecurities. If global temperatures continue to rise, 90% of the Himalayan region is predicted to face year-long droughts, jeopardising pastoralist resilience as well as the health of the rangelands that they depend on. Alongside large-scale climate-induced changes, pastoralist communities also face challenges like economic and political marginalization, wildlife-related losses, and cultural erosion. As a result, many young people are now migrating out of pastoralism with some moving to urban areas in search of employment. While such trends have the potential to open up new opportunities for the youth, women and girls are largely alienated from such processes. Since rangelands are already undervalued and labelled as wastelands, in the absence of their custodians, these ecosystems remain under threat from unmitigated infrastructural expansion at the cost of their biodiversity and carbon values.

The GRAZIER initiative is dedicated to supporting vulnerable pastoralist communities in Ladakh, with a special focus on women and youth, to foster sustainable development guided by diverse local priorities. It uses an experimental and intersectional socio-ecological approach that moves away from dichotomies like nature-culture, science-society, research-praxis. By gathering and integrating diverse knowledges, fostering innovation and experimentation, and supporting mechanisms to share learnings and unlearnings, the initiative aspires to encourage dynamic and adaptive perspectives on pastoralism and its intersection with rangeland health and biodiversity.

The initiative is conceptualized by an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional team of partners and knowledge-producers from across the region, nation and globe. It is a collaborative project between ATREE, Achi Association India, French National Institute of Sustainable Development (IRD), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. ATREE also has an MoU with the University of Ladakh to carry out joint academic research in support of this project. 

Funded by IRD and Rural India Support Trust