Community Wellbeing Mediates Drought Adaptation in South African Rangelands

Abstract

<title>Abstract</title> Climate change is triggering a diverse set of adaptive responses from communities across environmental and socioeconomic contexts. In African rangelands, selling livestock is critical for responding to changes in local environmental conditions. As these decisions further affect environmental and community wellbeing, identifying where, when, and how livestock sales are expected to respond to particular climatic shifts is important for delineating the total impact of climate change and responding accordingly. Scattered evidence suggests that socioeconomic wellbeing mediates how communities use cattle sales in response to precipitation. However, this has not been quantified as a generalizable trend across local to regional scales or within and between years. This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic wellbeing (measured through a standard deprivation index), precipitation, and monthly cattle slaughtering across South Africa from 2015 to 2022. We find that in better-off provinces (-1 standard deviation of deprivation), expected cattle slaughtering declined from 73,296 (90% CI: 38,430–130,709) under the highest observed precipitation, to 57,897 (90% CI: 30,431–103,378) in response to the lowest observed precipitation. In contrast, in worse-off provinces (+ 1 standard deviation), expected cattle slaughtering increased from 10,306 (90% CI: 5,916–19,753) under high precipitation, to 19,966 (90% CI: 11,437–38,245) in response to low precipitation. We further investigate this dynamic using a novel disaggregation regression statistical procedure, showing similar standardized effects sizes at a 16-km spatial resolution for the year 2020 and producing high-resolution estimates of where slaughtering was most likely given socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Our findings show that poorer communities are more prone to selling cattle in response to precipitation shortages, a practice that can erode long-term resilience and deepen inequalities. This general trend suggests that interventions encouraging strategic destocking during favorable conditions and maintaining herd health during droughts can build resilience in disadvantaged pastoral areas. Identifying such archetypal patterns can guide more deliberate implementation of interventions to support climate adaptation across many social-ecological settings.