Spring 2013

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Open Access
The tragedy of enclosure: climate change, fencing, and local environmental knowledge in Tibet
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2013-03-12) Hopping, Kelly, speaker
The impacts of climate change are distributed unevenly, and they may be exacerbated by top-down policies that are insensitive to the consequences of these changes for local communities. On the Tibetan Plateau, a shift toward privatized land management is dividing the land into smaller parcels and constraining pastoralists' traditional institutions for coping with environmental stressors. To understand how these changes are affecting herders in central Tibet, I interviewed members from every household in my study village about their concerns and knowledge of changing environmental conditions. I then combined their observations with data from satellite images to analyze how rangeland conditions have changed over the last four decades. I show how recently fenced grazing boundaries are causing the burdens of climate-induced land change to be shared unequally among pastoralists, with consequences for their ability to continue sustaining their traditional livelihoods.