Which specific livelihood groups (e.g., subsistence farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk) are most at risk from climate impacts, and how does this vary across different marginalized communities?

1. Key finding

Overall
A qualitative meta-analysis was conducted to explore patterns and trends in pastoral vulnerability, identifying six distinct pathways: Encroachment, Re-greening, Customary, Polarization, Communal, and No-Alternative. These pathways reflect how climate and socio-economic pressures shape pastoral resilience and adaptation.

Women and Girls-Related: Not available in this review.

2. Short Summary

Pastoralism has often been regarded as environmentally unsustainable and economically unviable, yet it remains a crucial livelihood for many communities. This study highlights how pastoralists’ vulnerability is shaped by exposure to both climate and non-climate transformations, unfavorable development policies, the adaptability of pastoralists, and the complex role of market integration. Climate-related risks, such as shifting precipitation patterns, prolonged droughts, and extreme weather, are compounded by non-climate stressors, including land-use changes, policy marginalization, and resource conflicts.

These pressures have led to reduced access to rangelands, shrinking herd sizes, and weakened traditional governance systems. The study categorizes pastoral vulnerability into six pathways: encroachment, where land loss to agriculture and infrastructure threatens traditional practices; re-greening, where afforestation alters pasture availability; customary, where traditional pastoral systems remain intact; polarization, where pastoralists either intensify livestock production or abandon it altogether; communal, where strong community resource management enhances resilience; and no-alternative, where pastoralists lack viable economic options beyond livestock.

Despite their resilience, pastoralists continue to face socio-economic barriers that limit their capacity to adapt. Addressing these vulnerabilities requires policies that integrate climate adaptation with land rights protections, fair development strategies, and improved market access to ensure the sustainability of pastoral livelihoods.

3. Long summary

3.1 PICOS 

 Population: Pastoralist communities in Mongolia, the Himalaya-Pamir, the Arctic, Western and Eastern Africa, European mountains, the Andes, Southern Africa, and Northern Africa.

Intervention: Climate stressors (changing precipitation, droughts, temperature rise, glacier retreat) and non-climate transformations (land-use policies, governance changes, economic marginalization, demographic pressures, and conflicts).

Outcome: Increasing constraints on pastoral livelihoods due to reduced access to grazing lands, weakened traditional institutions, shrinking herd sizes, and limited adaptation options.

Study design: Systematic review and qualitative meta-analysis of 74 case studies using multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis to identify trends.

3.2 Risk of bias Not assessed   

3.3 Publication bias  Not assessed

3.4 Findings

Pastoral communities are highly exposed to climate trends, with changes in the seasonality of precipitation and droughts being the most significant risks. Other climate-related threats include rising temperatures, floods, snowstorms, strong winds, glacier retreat, extreme winters, and reduced snowfall. Beyond climate factors, pastoralists also face non-climate pressures such as poorly designed policies that marginalize their way of life, the weakening of traditional institutions like elders’ councils, and violent conflicts. Additional stressors include agricultural encroachment on grazing lands, population growth, migration, increasing livestock competition, and the expansion of forests and shrubs onto traditional pasturelands.

The impacts of these challenges on pastoral livelihoods are severe, leading to reduced access to rangelands, increasing difficulties in maintaining traditional mobility, shrinking herd sizes, declining animal health, and growing reliance on markets. In response, pastoralists have adopted various adaptation strategies, including herd mobility, adjusting grazing patterns, diversifying their income through alternative livelihoods, and strengthening social networks through communal planning and herding. Market-based strategies such as increasing trade access, pasture enclosure, herd accumulation, and, in some cases, abandoning pastoralism altogether have also been observed.

Further adaptation measures include enhanced herd and household mobility, labor and farm diversification, shifts in livestock species composition, and herd restocking. Many pastoralists have also turned to skill development, participation in new markets, the use of high-yield livestock breeds, modern technologies, and, in some cases, the transition to more sedentary lifestyles as a means of coping with environmental and socio-economic pressures.

3.5 Sensitivity analysis Not assessed

4. AMSTAR 2 assessment of the review

5. Count of references to the following words

1. Headline finding

Overall: Climate change perceptions and adaptation are highly contextual and considerably varied by gender and different intersections. Women and men have different adoption strategies.

Women and girls-related: Female farmers were tend to be more concerned and fatalistic about climate change which reminds us the urgency of culturally appropriate climate change communication to obtain informed decision regarding climate change. Women adaopted differently to climate change as compared to men.

2. Short summary (approx. 150-200 words)

Existing gender role, farmers’ age, education, knowledge, marital status, intra-household power structure, religion, social status and ethnicity were intersecting with gender and climate change perception and adaptation. Apart from gender and intersectionality, access to resources, social network and local institutions are found to be important correlates of adaptation strategies by farmers. Among the financial adaptation strategies, selling assets and taking credit was most preferred financial adaptation. Women were found adopting different structural adaptation strategies like water harvesting, pen reinforcement, digging wells and boreholes, building water tanks and construction of trenches to control bushfire. Managereal adaptation strategies included change in cropping, and use of fertilizers. Socio-cultural adaptation

included reducing consumption of number and amount of meals and using wild plant to make traditional food to fight against drought. Livelihood adaptation included diversifying income through temporary non-farm activities. Seasonal or temporary migration was another form of adaptation.

Long summary

3.1 PICOS 

Peer-reviewed journal articles– those discussing gender disaggregated perception and/or adaptation to climate change in agriculture around the globe published from 1 January 2005 to 18 April 2019 and written in English were considered for this systematic review.

3.2 Risk of bias : Not done

3.3 Publication bias : Not done

3.4 Findings (up to one page)

Technical adaptation

• Technical adaptation strategies yielded six broad strategies . Twenty-seven among the 35 studies discussing gendered adaptation examined technical adaptation strategies. 

• Change of crop varieties, diversification of agriculture and improved agricultural technology were the most considered technical adaptation strategies in these studies. Both men and women adopted diverse adaptation strategies. Adoption of improved crop varieties was highly contextual and differed by study locations.

• Men in Kenya mentioned requirement of little rain as a motivation for changing variety, while women identified fast maturity (Ngigi et al., 2018). Improved livestock breed was adopted differently by men and women in Africa. Women from Tanzanian highland preferred improved livestock breed as most important adaptation practice, while men from Ugandan highland and Tanzania opted for the same (Mwongera et al., 2017; Wangui & Smucker, 2018). Adoption of diverse agriculture varied by gender and place. In Bangladesh, women were found to adopt diverse agriculture more than men (Hossain & Zaman, 2018; Naz et al., 2018), while in Ghana men were adopting more diverse agriculture than women (Jost et al., 2016; Kumasi et al., 2019).

Financial adaptation

• Financial adaptation resulted in four broad strategies. Seventeen studies examined financial adaptation, and among the strategies, selling assets and taking credit was most preferred financial adaptation.

• Selling assets in the face of climate change gives temporary relief to the farm families. In Ghana and Kenya, men preferred selling assets (e.g. livestock) to cope with drought but women chose borrowing from neighbours (Assan et al., 2018; Tongruksawattana & Wainaina, 2019). Women in extreme cases were found even selling their wedding ornaments (Tesfamariam & Hurlbert, 2017).

• Financial adaptation strategies may even vary from climatic events or impacts and gender. As for example, in Kenya, more male-headed households sold assets during drought but in case of increased pest infestation, more female-headed households sold their assets to adapt (Tongruksawattana & Wainaina, 2019). In case of taking loans, in Bangladesh and Malawi women got involved in saving scheme, depended more on savings (though earned and saved less) and took loan more often than men for starting micro enterprises (Hossain & Zaman, 2018; Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018; Naz et al., 2018) while in India, more men than women took loan, borrowed from neighbours and utilized savings (Mehar et al., 2016).

Structural adaptation

• Farmers build or modify different structures to adapt to different climatic situations. Findings from the 35 adaptation studies identified three broad structural adaptation strategies.

• Structural adaptation strategies were mostly the role of men. Preventive structures such as raising land, house reinforcement, micro-irrigation and construction of community drains were done by men as adaptation to floods (Afriyie et al., 2018; Codjoe et al., 2012; Jost et al., 2016). Women were found adopting different structural adaptation strategies. Water harvesting, pen reinforcement, digging wells and boreholes, building water tanks and construction of trenches to control bushfire were some of the adaptation strategies adopted by more women than men (Arku, 2013; Chah et al., 2018; Codjoe et al., 2012; Kumasi et al., 2019; Su et al., 2017).

Managerial adaptation

• Almost all of the studies except one had considered managerial adaptation. Twelve broad adaptation strategies were considered by the studies.

• In Tanzania, women mentioned change in cropping, and use of fertilizers as important climate smart agriculture (CSA), while men opted for conservative agriculture, improved feed and composting (Nyasimi et al., 2017). Opposite to this finding, women from Tanzania and tribal women of Ghana were more conservative in using natural resources than men (Smucker & Wangui, 2016; Wrigley-Asante et al., 2017). In Ghana, fishermen scored rearing fish in pond and lakes as the most important adaptation strategy for adapting to drought and women mentioned about seasonal forecast and post-harvest technology (Codjoe et al., 2012). 

• In Kenya, while husbands looked for limiting number of livestock and diversifying livestock feeds, wives diversified livestock portfolios through rearing of small ruminants and non-ruminant livestock during extreme climatic events (Birhanu et al., 2017; Ngigi et al., 2017).

• In Bangladesh, India and Nepal both, men and women found lending land to sharecroppers as the most important strategy (Naz et al., 2018; Sugden et al., 2014). Similarly, in Benin, women wanted to sell livestock earlier than men during food shortage caused by drought (Dah-gbeto & Villamor, 2016).

Socio-cultural adaptation

Eight studies discussed about gendered socio-cultural adaptation.

• In Ghana and Eritrea, women were found reducing consumption of number and amount of meals and using wild plant to make traditional food to fight against drought (Kumasi et al., 2019; Tesfamariam & Hurlbert, 2017), while in India, more men ate less or changed food habit than women (Mehar et al., 2016; Ravera et al., 2016)

• In Mali, agriculture was mainly men’s job, which had transformed to small-scale livestock rearing and added as a new role to play for women while men left agriculture and preferred migration or sharecropping due to changing climatic conditions (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011).

Livelihood adaptation

Twenty studies were found exploring livelihood adaptation strategies.

• Diversifying income through temporary non-farm activities could be seen as critical adaptation against climate change. While both men and women preferred diversifying income through nonfarm activities (Afriyie et al., 2018), they varied by gender as in Malawi, men opted for fisheries and agriculture-related initiatives, while women were more interested in petty business initiatives (Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018).

• Women were involved in many non-farm activities in climate affected period, such as non-agricultural labour, house-help, cleaning sales assistant (Chandra et al., 2017), charcoal production (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011) and hired labour in food processing (Arku, 2013). Accordingly, men had some exclusive alternative income diversifying activities, such as fishing, crab-fattening, herding, collecting Nipa palm leaves (locally known as golpata), wax and honey, selling labour and pulling non-motorized three wheelers in Bangladesh (Hossain & Zaman, 2018), and carpentry, blacksmithing or masonry, and hired labour in Ghana (Arku, 2013). At times, farmers abruptly changed their livelihood to adapt to climate change. In Mali, men changed their livelihood to pastoralism, while women took small-scale sedentary livestock management in homestead and forestbased livelihood (Djoudi & Brockhaus, 2011).

Migration as an adaptation

• Seasonal or temporary migration is another option for farmers. In pastoralist community, shifting or relocation is very common, but it varies by location. In Kenya, men followed a traditional shifting pattern from one pasture to another during drought (Rao, 2019). In Malawi, more women than men adopted circular migration between the fishing areas to allow fishes to regrow (Limuwa & Synnevåg, 2018), while in Ghana, both men and women preferred shifting farm area to a neighbouring higher land (Afriyie et al., 2018).

3.5 Sensitivity analysis

4. AMSTAR 2 assessment of the review

5. Count of references to