Riders under storms: Contributions of nomadic herders’ observations to analysing climate change in Mongolia

Predictions of climate change and its impacts are highly uncertain at regional and local levels. Downscaled models often operate with a too coarse scale and look at standard parameters that may be irrelevant to resource-dependent people. This article argues that a more robust analysis and prediction of climate change at local levels can be inferred from the integration of local people's observation of change with meteorological records and models.The example proposed here is the analysis of climate change in the desert-steppe region of Mongolia. While regional models and local analyses agree that Mongolia has become warmer, predictions either ignore or are contradictory about the changes in precipitations and sand storms. The Mongolian pastoral nomads on the other hand identify longer and more intense droughts and sand storms as the most important recent climatic changes, relevant to their livelihoods. In addition, they record detailed changes in the precipitations regime. Thus, they are unequivocal that rains have become patchy – ‘silk embroidery rains’ – (forcing pastoralists to move farther and more frequently), more intense (thus less effective due to runoff) and that summer rains are delayed (reducing the growing season).The observations of the pastoralists can only partly be investigated in light of meteorological records due to different parameters observed by the two systems. Nevertheless, additional evidence derived from the analysis of meteorological records resonates with the perceptions of the herders and adds elements for further investigation. This combined evidence suggests that due to a southern shift of the East Asian Monsoon, rains in southern Mongolia rely on re-circulated local moisture, leading to large-scale droughts and in turn more frequent sand storms.The analysis provided herein shows that combining the two knowledge systems (local people's observations and climatology) holds the potential to provide more reliant and relevant investigations of climate change and allow for better planned adaptations.