Key Highlights
- 2026 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralists.
- Grasslands and savannahs store carbon, preserve biodiversity and enhance climate resilience, yet they receive far less attention and funding than forests.
- A 2022 open letter in *Science* urged the UNFCCC to widen its climate agenda to include all biomes, especially grasslands.
- Recent COP30 negotiations in Brazil prioritized forest initiatives, leaving rangeland strategies under‑developed.
- Threats such as agricultural conversion, invasive species, fossil‑fuel extraction and fire‑suppression policies intensify the degradation of grassland ecosystems worldwide.
Detailed Insights
The United Nations’ decision to label 2026 as the International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralists seeks to correct a long‑standing bias in global climate policy that elevates forests while marginalizing other critical ecosystems. Scientific studies have demonstrated that many grassland and savannah regions act as carbon sinks comparable to, and in some cases surpassing, forested landscapes. Despite these findings, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) continues to centre its negotiations on forest preservation, a pattern starkly evident during the 2023 COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, where the newly‑launched Tropical Forest Forever Facility attracted the bulk of financial commitments.
The omission of explicit grassland provisions from COP30’s outcomes underscores a systemic policy lag: funding streams, technical assistance, and national climate plans remain heavily skewed toward forest conservation. This misalignment not only undermines the effectiveness of climate mitigation but also disregards the livelihoods of pastoral communities who depend on healthy rangelands.
Grasslands confront a suite of pressures: conversion to intensive agriculture, invasion by non‑native species, fragmentation from mining and energy projects, and paradoxical fire‑suppression regimes that increase the risk of catastrophic wildfires. Indigenous land‑management practices—such as controlled burning and adaptive grazing—are frequently excluded from official strategies, further aggravating ecosystem vulnerability.
Case studies from the Australian desert, where severe droughts, flash floods, and invasive buffel grass intensify fire hazards, and Brazil’s Cerrado savannah, which experiences land‑use pressure exceeding that of the Amazon, illustrate the global scale of the crisis. In India, fragmented institutional oversight hampers coherent grass‑land governance, but recognizing these ecosystems as carbon sinks within the nation’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) could deliver climate benefits while supporting pastoral economies.
Achieving a balanced climate agenda will require coordinated action across the UNFCCC, UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and national ministries, ensuring that scientific evidence translates into equitable policy and financing mechanisms for all biomes.
Key Concepts
- Carbon sink: A natural reservoir that absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases, thereby mitigating climate change.
- UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change): The principal international treaty governing climate‑change mitigation, adaptation and finance, under which nations submit their NDCs.
- Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs): Voluntary climate action plans submitted by each country outlining how they will reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.
- Fire‑suppression policy: Governmental strategies aimed at extinguishing wildfires, which can unintentionally increase fuel loads and intensify future fire events.
- Pastoralists: Communities whose livelihoods depend on the sustainable grazing of livestock on rangelands.