Degradation of Grassland Ecosystems in the Developing World: The Tragedy of Breaking Coupled Human-Natural Systems

Since Hardin (1968) published his famous theory Tragedy of the Commons supported by examples showing that communal grasslands can be easily overgrazed when herdsman increase their herd numbers, a lot of research has supported the viewpoint that rangeland degradation and desertification in much of the pastoral areas in the developing world are caused by overgrazing (Arnalds and Archer 2000). With increasing focus on change at the global scale, many scientists, guided by the disequilibrium theory, hypothesized that climatic variability and change rather than overgrazing is associated with rangeland degradation. We argue that neither overgrazing nor climate change can alone explain the degradation of rangelands worldwide. In contrast, failure to reconcile emergent issues at the interface between the ecological, economic and social aspects has repeatedly resulted in management and policy actions that do not achieve the objectives of optimizing yield of rangeland products in a sustainable manner. The coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) approach proposed by Liu et al. (2007) can be used to identify applicable approaches for helping pastoral societies worldwide cope with global change by facilitating effective collaboration among social scientists, bio/physical scientists, practitioners, managers, and users to protect and sustain pastoral environments (Dong et al. 2011)