LANDac conference

Man-made climate change is creating conditions on our planet that are increasingly characterised by variability and unpredictability. Pastoralists use variability to their advantage. Their production systems guide us to a sustainable future. This video was created in support of the International Year of Rangelands & Pastoralists (IYRP) 2026.

Subtitles in Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, German, Hindi, Italian, Spanish and Mongolian).

Also available in French, Fulfulde, Swahili and Amharic

Scenario by Saverio Krätli, Vétérinaires Sans Frontières Belgium, Agrecol and Misereor; funded by Misereor and the Belgian Government; produced by Cartoonbase Belgium.

This documentary focuses on how pastoralists thrive despite climate change. As the environment becomes more unpredictable all over the world, people face higher costs in an effort to sustain the usual strategies to control it. The WoDaabe pastoralists in Niger show that there is another way.

The Tes River flows from the Bulnai Mountains through three Mongolian provinces – Khuvsgul, Zavkhan and Uvs – feeds into Lake Uvs, registered by UNESCO in 2013 as a Natural World Heritage site. On the banks of the river live mobile herder families who believe the river is God’s blessing for them, being the source of their livelihood and of water for humans and animals. The full-length film (56 min, of which this is an excerpt) shows the lifestyle of Mongolian herders, rotational grazing of rangelands and people’s attitudes to and respect for their natural environment, by depicting the lives of three families living near the top, middle and end of the Tes River Valley.

The full-film with English subtitles can be found here. The 8-min excerpt made for the IYRP 2026 can be viewed here.

This advocacy film by the Oakland Institute (USA) reveals the situation of agropastoralists in the Lower Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is home to about 200,000 people from several ethnic groups, e.g. Bode, Dassenach, Hamer, Karo, Kwegu, Mursi, Nyangatom and Suri. Most of them raise livestock where the Omo River’s annual flooding replenishes grazing areas and practise flood-retreat cropping on the floodplains. Their cattle are a source of food, wealth and pride, and are intimately tied to their cultural identity. Their lives and culture are threatened by the construction of the Gibe III Dam.

This video on their struggles for land rights was made by six community members from five Maasai clans in northern Tanzania during a training by InsightShare in participatory video (PV). In 1992, a hunting company from the United Arab Emirates occupied 1500 sq. km of village land in Loliondo to set up a private game reserve beside the Serengeti National Park. Since then, Maasai have been denied access to vital pasture and waterpoints for their herds. The people suffered mass eviction from their villages within the disputed land. The PV training strengthened the Maasai’s own advocacy to resist landgrabbing by foreign investors.

From inside his yurt in northern Mongolia, the reindeer herder Bayandalai ‒ an elder of the Dukhas tribe ‒ muses about the significance of life and death in the largest forest on Earth, the Taiga. Through his connection with the reindeer and with the Taiga, Bayandalai has access to spiritual truths and higher consciousness that he may not be able to pass on to his family members before the lures of city life — jobs, money, houses, things — entice them away.