El Niño: Livestock farmers need financial buffers, not just forecasts

As Africa prepares for the arrival of a powerful El Niño weather event, an international team of researchers led by the University of Sydney and Imperial College London has found that access to improved forecasts alone will not protect many of the region’s poorest livestock farmers from the impacts of climate change.

Published this week in Nature Sustainability, the study shows that weather information must be paired with practical “risk-smoothing” measures, such as supplementary livestock feed, drought insurance, targeted financial support or improved market access, so that farmers at risk of losing livestock can act before drought strikes.

By combining improved access to climate information with supported risk-smoothing, livestock farmers can avoid environmental trade-offs that occur when either is used in isolation.

Beyond forecasts: Why financial buffers matter

Lead author Dr Matt Clark, a research associate in sustainability science with the Thriving Oceans Research Hub in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, said climate variability was becoming an “inequity multiplier”.

“If the forecasts prove correct and we see a near-record El Niño develop, we expect this will amplify inequalities across southern African rangelands.

“The problem isn’t that poor farmers don’t have climate information. The problem is they often can’t afford to act on it. Wealthier producers can reduce herd sizes ahead of drought and rebuild when conditions improve. Many small-scale pastoralists simply don’t have that financial buffer,” Clark said.

Rangelands under pressure: The human and economic cost

Across southern Africa, millions of pastoralists depend on cattle, sheep and goats grazing vast rangelands stretching across Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Livestock are far more than a source of income; they are a family’s savings, food security and cultural identity, often passed down through generations.

As climate change brings more variability between good seasons and severe drought, those communities face increasingly difficult decisions. Wealthier livestock owners can often sell animals before drought, preserve their savings and rebuild their herds when conditions improve. Poorer pastoralists are frequently forced to keep their animals on increasingly stressed landscapes, risking devastating livestock losses that can trap families in poverty.

“It’s not that the people we work with aren’t thinking about adapting to climate change,” said Dr Gina Arena, science lead for Herding for Health, Conservation International.

“It’s that with greater uncertainty in climate comes greater risk. We need to help people identify the best decisions and reduce the risk of implementation. Research like this helps us do that,” Arena said.

Lessons from the field: Scaling adaptive solutions

Applying detailed modelling alongside work with non-government organisations in the field, the researchers found that climate forecasts can become substantially more effective when combined with support that enables households to respond before drought takes hold.

“The encouraging finding is that this isn’t about inventing new technology. It is about applying existing knowledge in new ways,” Clark said.

“Weather forecasting is becoming increasingly accurate. The opportunity now is to make sure those forecasts are paired with practical support so the people who need them most can actually benefit.”

The study suggests this combination of climate information and risk-smoothing can improve livelihoods, reduce inequality and protect rangelands at the same time, overcoming trade-offs that have long challenged climate adaptation programs.

While developed for southern African pastoral systems, Clark said the framework could also help livestock producers in other climate-vulnerable grazing lands, including in Australia.

“The methodology we’ve developed for southern African pastoralists could equally be applied in Australia and other regions facing increasingly variable rainfall. As climate extremes become more common, adaptation needs to be as much about helping people act as improving the forecasts themselves,” Clark said.

Testing climate adaptation at scale

The researchers developed a model representing pastoral communities across seven southern African countries, drawing on projected rainfall patterns from European climate models together with empirical data on livestock, vegetation and community wealth.

The first simulation represented a business-as-usual future, showing that increasing rainfall variability reduced household wealth, increased livestock losses, degraded grasslands and widened inequality.

The second tested adaptation strategies. Access to forecasts alone delivered only modest benefits because many households lacked the financial capacity to respond, while risk-smoothing measures on their own could force environmental trade-offs.

The third simulation examined how adaptation could spread between neighbouring communities. Based on conservation programs such as Conservation International’s Herding for Health initiative, it showed that when practical support accompanied climate information, communities learned from one another, and adoption became self-reinforcing, providing a pathway for climate adaptation at scale.

“It’s easy to think of mathematical modelling as abstract, but here it is doing something very practical,” said Cosima Fröhner, former Mary Lister McCammon Fellow at Imperial College London.

“We simulate the decisions of thousands of individual livestock farmers under different climate conditions and interventions for adaptation. As the model settles into a stable state, the wider patterns and the trade-offs between interventions emerge from all those individual decisions.”