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Adapting agricultural water use to climate change in a post-Soviet context: challenges and opportunities in southeast Kazakhstan
The convergence of climate change and post-Soviet
socio-economic and institutional transformations has been
underexplored so far, as have the consequences of such convergence on crop agriculture in Central Asia. This paper provides a place-based analysis of constraints and opportunities for adaptation to climate change, with a specific focus on water use, in two districts in southeast Kazakhstan. Data were collected by 2 multi-stakeholder participatory workshops, 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary statistical data. The present-day agricultural system is characterised by
enduring Soviet-era management structures, but without state inputs that previously sustained agricultural productivity. Low margins of profitability on many privatised farms mean that attempts to implement integrated water management have produced water users associations unable to maintain and upgrade a deteriorating irrigation infrastructure. Although actors
engage in tactical adaptation measures, necessary structural adaptation of the irrigation system remains difficult without significant public or private investments. Market-based water management models have been translated ambiguously to this region, which fails to encourage efficient water use and hinders adaptation to water stress. In addition, a mutual interdependence of informal networks and formal institutions characterises both state governance and everyday life in Kazakhstan. Such interdependence simultaneously facilitates
operational and tactical adaptation, but hinders structural adaptation, as informal networks exist as a parallel system that achieves substantive outcomes while perpetuating the inertia and incapacity of the state bureaucracy. This article has relevance for critical understanding of integrated water management in practice and adaptation to climate change in post-Soviet institutional settings more broadly
Modeling the spatial distribution of grazing intensity in Kazakhstan
© 2019 Hankerson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. With increasing affluence in many developing countries, the demand for livestock products is rising and the increasing feed requirement contributes to pressure on land resources for food and energy production. However, there is currently a knowledge gap in our ability to assess the extent and intensity of the utilization of land by livestock, which is the single largest land use in the world. We developed a spatial model that combines fine-scale livestock numbers with their associated energy requirements to distribute livestock grazing demand onto a map of energy supply, with the aim of estimating where and to what degree pasture is being utilized. We applied our model to Kazakhstan, which contains large grassland areas that historically have been used for extensive livestock production but for which the current extent, and thus the potential for increasing livestock production, is unknown. We measured the grazing demand of Kazakh livestock in 2015 at 286 Petajoules, which was 25% of the estimated maximum sustainable energy supply that is available to livestock for grazing. The model resulted in a grazed area of 1.22 million km2, or 48% of the area theoretically available for grazing in Kazakhstan, with most utilized land grazed at low intensities (average off-take rate was 13% of total biomass energy production). Under a conservative scenario, our estimations showed a production potential of 0.13 million tons of beef additional to 2015 production (31% increase), and much more with utilization of distant pastures. This model is an important step forward in evaluating pasture use and available land resources, and can be adapted at any spatial scale for any region in the world
Modeling the spatial distribution of grazing intensity in Kazakhstan
© 2019 Hankerson et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. With increasing affluence in many developing countries, the demand for livestock products is rising and the increasing feed requirement contributes to pressure on land resources for food and energy production. However, there is currently a knowledge gap in our ability to assess the extent and intensity of the utilization of land by livestock, which is the single largest land use in the world. We developed a spatial model that combines fine-scale livestock numbers with their associated energy requirements to distribute livestock grazing demand onto a map of energy supply, with the aim of estimating where and to what degree pasture is being utilized. We applied our model to Kazakhstan, which contains large grassland areas that historically have been used for extensive livestock production but for which the current extent, and thus the potential for increasing livestock production, is unknown. We measured the grazing demand of Kazakh livestock in 2015 at 286 Petajoules, which was 25% of the estimated maximum sustainable energy supply that is available to livestock for grazing. The model resulted in a grazed area of 1.22 million km2, or 48% of the area theoretically available for grazing in Kazakhstan, with most utilized land grazed at low intensities (average off-take rate was 13% of total biomass energy production). Under a conservative scenario, our estimations showed a production potential of 0.13 million tons of beef additional to 2015 production (31% increase), and much more with utilization of distant pastures. This model is an important step forward in evaluating pasture use and available land resources, and can be adapted at any spatial scale for any region in the world