Implementing improved management practices in grasslands

Protecting grasslands and savannahs and the ecosystem services they provide requires conscious management and a mixture of protected areas, sustainable management, and focused restoration.

• Assess drivers of loss and degradation of natural grassland and savannah, including the adverse impacts of climate change on natural and semi-natural grasslands.
• Avoid conversion of grasslands into cropland, afforestation sites, or intensive land uses. Grasslands host a wealth of biodiversity and their conversion is recognized as a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide. Moreover, grassland soils store a large amount of organic carbon that, if exposed to the atmosphere (e.g., through tillage), is mostly released to the atmosphere in form of CO2 emissions. Avoiding conversion of grasslands into croplands is therefore the foremost strategy to avoid CO2 emissions from these lands.
• Transition from ‘grassland degradation’ to ‘grassland restoration.’ Degraded grasslands are usually characterized by reduced vegetation, declines in soil organic matter, soil erosion, decreased productivity, and/or loss of biodiversity. Restorative interventions include activities that aim to recover native grass cover through revegetation, natural regeneration, and assisted natural regeneration. These interventions aim to recover or enhance ecosystem functions and services, such as carbon storage and water regulation, among others. Trees also play an integral role in many traditional grassland management systems, and their integration may offer opportunities for sustainable management depending on the context. See Implementing silvo-pastoral practices.
• Improve animal grazing. Over-grazing (e.g., too many grazing animals per hectare, or continuous-grazing management) is a major driver of grassland degradation, which reduces ecosystems’ productivity and increases GHG emissions. Improved grazing strategies are context dependent, but optimizing grazing intensity (e.g., rotational grazing) has been shown to be effective, especially in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Rotational grazing, as opposed to continuous grazing, allows the vegetation to recover between grazing events. Optimal use of grasslands for animals can be achieved by varying the species, number, or distribution of animals on the land.
• Improve fire regimes. Proactive fire management can increase carbon sequestration and reduce GHG emissions. This can be achieved by prescribing burning, animal grazing, or mechanical vegetation thinning to reduce biomass-fuel loads and thus the risk of uncontrolled wildfires. However, fire management practices for climate mitigation are context-specific and can entail trade-offs (e.g., on biodiversity), and their effectiveness is still under scrutiny by the scientific community.

Enabling governance measures such as those below are essential for facilitating the implementation of improved grassland management practices:

• Adopt a more cohesive national policy framework and a robust ecosystem classification system to successfully conserve and restore grasslands. A cohesive framework would consider grasslands’ carbon sequestration potential, emissions arising from their conversion, and roles for biodiversity protection before targeting grasslands as sites for afforestation.
• Recognize and respect the role of traditional governance structures, customary law, and practices by Indigenous Peoples and local communities for managing grasslands in ways that build resilience to extreme events.
• Recognize and enable pastoral mobility as a strategy for climate change adaptation and sustainable land management by Indigenous Peoples, local communities, farmers, and herders.
• Implement capacity building support for Indigenous Peoples, local communities, farmers and herders to adopt sustainable livestock grazing and management practices. Invest in decent employment and livelihood opportunities, especially for women and youth – for instance, through investment in entrepreneurship, enterprise, smallholders and family operations – to ensure the existence of inclusive, equitable, diversified, and decent opportunities to generate income, including outside of livestock grazing.
• Assess the economic value and benefits of ecosystem services delivered through a shift to more sustainable grazing practices, such as soil carbon storage, climate change adaptation potential, and diversity of pollinator communities increasing crop productivity in adjacent agricultural areas.
• Promote payments for ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable management of grasslands through public-private partnerships.
• Implement agricultural subsidies that support and incentivize less intensive, sustainable agricultural use of grassland practices, recognizing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities and collaborating with these groups in inclusive ways.
• Promote product certification and labelling schemes for nature-positive agricultural grassland management practices.
• Promote and strengthen value chain development for sustainably generated grassland products such as pastoral products.

Key tools and guides to support the successful implementation of improved grassland management can include:

Tools

Guides

Implementing improved grassland management can play a critical role in addressing climate change, while directly supporting the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, advancing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), and contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Climate change mitigation benefits

Enhanced grassland management can play a key role in mitigating climate change:

• According to FAO, improving management practices on grasslands via incorporation of organic manures, some types of agroforestry practices, and rotational grazing could sequester 0.3 tonnes of carbon per hectare per year in top soils.
• The mitigation potential between 2020 and 2050 has been estimated at 0.13-2.56 GtCO2 per year for enhancing soil carbon sequestration in grasslands; 0.03-0.12 GtCO2 per year for reducing conversion of savannas and natural grasslands; and an additional 0.01 GtCO2 per year for reduced emissions from manures on pastures.

Climate change adaptation benefits

Among the seven key areas of adaptation put forward in the UAE Framework for Global Climate Resilience, implementing improved management practices in grasslands can directly contribute to:

• Target 9a (Water & Sanitation): Healthy grasslands act as natural sponges, improving water infiltration and storage in soils. This reduces surface runoff, prevents soil erosion, and helps maintain clean water sources by filtering pollutants. Improved grassland management can also protect and regulate watersheds, improving resilience to drought and flooding and ensuring reliable and clean water supplies for both people and wildlife.
• Target 9b (Food & Agriculture): Improved grassland management-such as rotational grazing, reseeding native species, and reducing avoiding overgrazing-enhances soil fertility, increases forage availability, and boosts livestock productivity. This leads to more resilient food systems, higher yields, and greater food security for communities.
• Target 9d (Ecosystems): Restoring and maintaining healthy grasslands helps conserve biodiversity, protect endangered species, and maintain ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and pollination. These practices also reduce land degradation and desertification, which are critical for ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change.
• Target 9e (Infrastructure): Well-managed grasslands can act as buffers against extreme weather events, by stabilizing soils and protecting roads, bridges, and rural settlements from erosion, landslides, and flooding.
• Target 9f (Livelihoods): Many rural and Indigenous communities rely on grasslands for grazing, agriculture, and other forms of income. By improving grassland health, these communities can sustain and diversify their livelihoods, reduce vulnerability to climate shocks (such as droughts), and build long-term economic resilience.

Biodiversity benefits

Sustainable grasslands management practices can contribute to several KM-GBF targets, particularly:

• Target 1 (Plan and Manage all Areas to Reduce Biodiversity Loss): Implementing improved grassland management practices can help reduce threats to biodiversity by mitigating the impacts of land-use conversion and intensive agriculture. Research shows that both highly intensive management and removal of grazing can lead to reductions in plant species richness. Regional planning that leverages large spatial datasets and digital tools can also help reduce potential trade-offs between conservation and agricultural use.
• Target 2 (Restore 30% of all Degraded Ecosystems): Improved grassland management practices can serve as effective restoration strategies in grassy degraded ecosystems. Reducing mowing frequency and implementing appropriate grazing strategies, for instance, can increase plant species richness and help in restoring natural ecological processes in grasslands.
• Target 3 (Conserve 30% of Land, Waters and Seas): Grasslands worldwide are under threat from climate change, overgrazing, and excessive use of synthetic fertilizer, which is undermining their capacity to support biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being. Only 14 of the world’s 70 grassland ecoregions are at least 60% intact. Implementing improved management practices in protected areas can mitigate impacts of human activities on ecosystems of high conservation values, enabling local communities to sustainably benefit from their enhanced productivity and other ecosystem services.
• Target 4 (Halt Species Extinction, Protect Genetic Diversity, and Manage Human-Wildlife Conflicts): Reducing or halting the conversion of grasslands, along with their sustainable management, would directly contribute to halting species extinction – particularly in view of the high endemism rate found in grasslands – and to preserve genetic diversity by maintaining natural or semi-natural gene flows.
• Target 8 (Minimize the Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity and Build Resilience): Given the central role of grasslands in water retention, carbon storage and in delivering other climate-related ecosystem services, the sustainable management of these ecosystems presents huge opportunities for minimizing the impacts of climate change on biodiversity, through maintaining and enhancing ecological resilience and potentially reducing the frequency and/or intensity of natural disasters associated with climate change.
• Target 10 (Enhance Biodiversity and Sustainability in Agriculture, Aquaculture, Fisheries, and Forestry): Improved grassland management practices contribute to more sustainable agricultural systems. By balancing biodiversity conservation with agricultural production, these practices help maintain ecosystem services provided by grasslands while supporting food security.

Other sustainable development benefits

Implementing improved management practices in grasslands can support the delivery of multiple SDGs by:

• SDG 1 (No Poverty): improving livelihoods, for which more than 1.5 billion people are estimated to depend on grasslands globally. Of these, 200 and 600 million people are estimated to be from pastoral communities.
• SDG 2 (No Hunger): sustaining local agriculture and general food security by enhancing soil fertility, increasing forage availability, and boosting livestock productivity.
• SDG 13 (Climate Action): increasing carbon sequestration, helping reduce overall GHG emissions and providing adaptation benefits such as soil erosion control and water supply and flow regulation.
• SDG 15 (Life on Land): providing resilient habitats that provide a range of ecosystem functions supporting biodiversity, including pollination and pest control.

The success of interventions and projects aimed at implementing improved management practices in grasslands depends on their sound design and effective execution, which may be impeded by various technical and non-technical challenges, including:

• Grassland conservation and restoration might lead to conflicts with other land uses, such as agriculture or infrastructure expansion. This might be reflected in the different perceived values of grasslands by different stakeholder groups (e.g., pastoralists and other local communities, foresters and other decision makers).
• Avoiding grassland conversion could be tackled by intensifying productivity on current croplands. However, agricultural intensification might lead to increasing emissions from, for example, higher fertilization rates.

Integrating the following measures into a comprehensive and holistic design for implementing improved management practices in grassland interventions can help minimize trade-offs and overcome implementation challenges:

• Conservation and restoration initiatives that might generate trade-offs need to first build a common understanding of the value of grasslands among stakeholders, ensuring inclusive and participatory approaches with local and Indigenous groups.
• Conservation and restoration efforts need to be designed as part of comprehensive sustainable development plans that also consider the effects on other land uses and possible trade-offs. For example, to ensure the long-term sustainability of interventions such as increasing cropland productivity to prevent the conversion of grasslands, it is important to adopt sustainable intensification strategies such as regenerative or climate-smart agriculture practices.

The effective implementation of sustainable grassland management requires the use of effective monitoring instruments, clearly defined performance indicators, and integrated evaluation frameworks, including those used to measure progress on biodiversity and climate-related outcomes.

Indicators to monitor biodiversity outcomes

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed to a comprehensive set of headline, component, and complementary indicators for tracking progress toward the targets of the KM-GBF. Some of these indicators could also be functional for monitoring the implementation of this policy option. These indicators are:

Tools to monitor biodiversity outcomes

Tools to monitor climate outcomes

The cost of implementation varies by country and local context, but estimates include:

• Restoration costs of grasslands in 200 European projects (including different restoration techniques) were estimated to be on average EUR 1,227 per hectare.).
• Calculations of the economic viability of interventions should also consider the massive costs that grassland degradation has on livestock production, which over the period of 2001-11, was estimated at around at USD 6.8 billion globally. The impacts of grassland degradation on livestock are particularly severe in regions where most of the population is below the poverty line.

A notable example of the successful implementation of improved grassland management includes:

• In the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (China), an increasing rural population and number of domestic livestock was putting the land under intense pressure, with increasing degradation and desertification of grasslands. Restoration efforts focused on planting trees had proven mostly unsuccessful. A pilot study tested the potential for natural revegetation by protecting the land from grazing, while planting forage crops on smaller plots to sustain local livestock. Only a few years after the project started, the grassland restoration has proven so successful that the Chinese government has revised its policies in favour of grassland protection. More information and projects can be retrieved from the Society for Ecological Restoration’s project database.

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