The research team, led by Idrissa Sawadogo and colleagues, surveyed transhumant pastoralists, sedentary livestock keepers, and agro-pastoralists across twelve villages in the communes of Boudry and Mogtédo. The region sits in the Sudano-Sahelian belt, where mean annual rainfall ranges from 600 to 900 millimeters and temperatures swing between 24.5 and 30.8 degrees Celsius. Households were interviewed in French and in the local Moore and Fulfulde languages, with questions covering household demographics, perceptions of climate change, adaptation practices, and the barriers standing in their way. The average household head was 48 years old, 90 percent of respondents were male, and herds averaged roughly 90 animals, underscoring how deeply livelihoods depend on livestock.

Perceptions of a changing climate differed sharply by livelihood group. Among transhumant herders, 96.12 percent reported rising temperatures and increasingly intense heat, particularly between February and April, while agro-pastoralists were more worried about water: 68.32 percent reported declining rainfall and more frequent droughts. Sedentary keepers were split, with 71.21 percent observing hotter conditions but nearly 29 percent actually reporting increased rainfall. These divergent perceptions matter, the authors argue, because what herders perceive shapes what they do. A herder who sees heat as the enemy invests differently from one who sees drought coming.

Statistical analysis revealed that the pressures bearing down on pastoralists are not independent problems but tightly interlocked ones. A principal component analysis showed that fodder shortage, declining water points, and rising feed costs cluster together on a single dimension, suggesting a common underlying squeeze on resources. A second dimension captured mobility-related disruptions, such as obstructed livestock tracks and falling animal productivity. Correspondence analysis added a social layer: Fulani herders were strongly associated with fodder shortages, livestock diseases, and farmer-herder conflicts, reflecting their dependence on mobility and shared grazing lands, while Mossi households clustered near livestock mortality and declining fodder quality, and Gourmantche herders aligned with reduced productivity, pointing to structural constraints in herd management and market access.

The spatial story is perhaps the most striking. Mapping transhumance networks across Burkina Faso and into Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and Benin revealed a structured north-south system: Sahelian zones function as departure areas, while the wetter Sudanian zones and coastal countries serve as dry-season destinations. But the map also exposed a troubling pattern. Conflict hotspots concentrate precisely along the transhumance corridors, especially in the agro-pastoral transition zones of central and southern Burkina Faso, where competition for grazing land, water points, and crop residues is fiercest. Road obstructions along key mobility axes compound the risk, turning what was once a fluid ecological strategy into a gauntlet of institutional and security barriers.

When asked why they change their transhumance destinations, herders gave an answer dominated by ecology but increasingly shaped by politics. A remarkable 98.23 percent cited fodder scarcity as the main driver, and 72.5 percent pointed to difficult access to water. Yet 68 percent cited road insecurity and 53.1 percent cited recurrent farmer-herder conflicts, while administrative constraints and high water costs added further friction. The authors interpret this as a structural transformation: the determinants of pastoral mobility, once almost purely climatic, are now increasingly socio-political, meaning that securing corridors requires governance reform as much as rangeland restoration.

To understand who adapts and how, the team employed a multivariate probit model, a statistical framework that jointly estimates eight separate adaptation choices while allowing their unobserved drivers to be correlated. This matters because herders do not pick strategies in isolation; they build portfolios. The model showed that livestock size was the most consistent and positive determinant, significantly boosting adoption of fodder storage, income diversification, feed supplementation, early livestock sales, and transhumance itself. Larger herds, in other words, provide the financial cushion and risk-bearing capacity needed to invest in climate resilience. Education was the second pillar, significantly increasing the likelihood of vaccination, fodder crop production, income diversification, and feed supplementation, reflecting better access to information and innovation. Gender also shaped decisions, while household size showed a limited negative effect, hinting at resource dilution in larger families.

The correlation matrix from the model delivered perhaps the study’s most encouraging insight: adaptation strategies are complementary, not substitutive. Transhumance correlated positively with income diversification (r = 0.399), early livestock sales (r = 0.331), and vaccination (r = 0.311), while fodder storage aligned with income diversification (r = 0.331). Households that move their herds also vaccinate, sell early, and diversify earnings. This portfolio-based risk management suggests that policies promoting a single strategy, such as building boreholes alone, may miss the synergies that make adaptation stick.

Adoption rates varied dramatically across production systems, revealing three distinct adaptation worlds. Preventive vaccination was nearly universal among transhumant herders at 88.30 percent, but feed supplementation told the inverse story: 49.21 percent of transhumant herders used it, compared with 97.32 percent of sedentary herders and 99.12 percent of agro-pastoralists. Fodder storage followed the same divide, practiced by 99.20 percent of sedentary herders but only 38.50 percent of transhumant ones. Fodder crop cultivation was almost absent among transhumant households at 8.15 percent, while transhumance itself was practiced by 100 percent of transhumant herders, 23 percent of agro-pastoralists, and no sedentary keepers. Cluster analysis then grouped households into three vulnerability profiles: those squeezed by water access who rely on long-distance cross-border movement, those losing grazing land who resort to informal grazing in protected areas, and those dominated by farmer-herder conflict amid agricultural expansion.

The policy implications are as concrete as they are urgent. The authors call for the legal protection and restoration of transhumance corridors, the development of strategic water points along pastoral routes, stronger climate and livestock advisory services, and fodder production initiatives suited to Sudano-Sahelian conditions. They also stress that only 21 percent of surveyed households held individual or state-recognized land rights, with most relying on customary arrangements, an insecurity that discourages long-term investment in pasture improvement. With low schooling levels and weak participation in collective organizations, only 11 percent belonged to pastoral groups, many households lack the human and social capital to seize available options. As climate change tightens its grip on the Sahel, the study concludes that protecting mobility, educating herders, and securing resource access are not separate goals but a single, interdependent agenda for keeping millions of livelihoods alive.

Subject of Research: Determinants of pastoral climate change adaptation strategies in West African rangelands

Article Title: Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis

Article References: Sawadogo, I., Bayen, P., Kouassi, F. A., & Worou, O. N. (2026). Spatial constraints and drivers of pastoral adaptation to climate change in West African rangelands: A multivariate probit analysis. Environmental Challenges, 25, Article 101676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101676

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: pastoralism, transhumance, climate change adaptation, Burkina Faso, Sahel, rangelands, multivariate probit, farmer-herder conflict, livestock mobility, fodder scarcity, water access, land tenure

The research team, led by Kuma J. Ayua of Federal University Lokoja, together with Arya J. Akbar and Anthony J. Ilozobhie, set out to close a gap that has frustrated policymakers for years. Ranching is frequently championed as a replacement for open grazing, and several Nigerian states have already passed anti-open-grazing laws, yet ranches fail quickly if they are built where water is unreliable. Previous studies had diagnosed the causes of the violence, including resource competition, population growth and religio-cultural tensions, but few had asked the practical hydrogeological question: which specific patches of ground can actually sustain a ranch? The new work translates groundwater science directly into siting guidance.

The technical backbone of the study is a set of ninety-six vertical electrical soundings, acquired during the dry seasons of 2017 and 2022 so that groundwater conditions were measured at their most stressed. Using an ABEM SAS 1000 terrameter with a Schlumberger array, the team measured how electrical resistivity changes with depth, then interpreted the curves through partial curve matching and one-dimensional inversion with WinResist software. Only models achieving a root-mean-square error below five percent were accepted, ensuring that the derived geoelectric layers, from which aquifer resistivity, thickness, hydraulic conductivity, transmissivity and longitudinal conductance were computed, faithfully represented the subsurface.

Because groundwater in this region hides in fractures as much as in pores, the researchers also hunted for structural clues from above. Lineaments, the surface traces of faults, joints and fractures, were extracted from Landsat 8 imagery and from high-resolution aeromagnetic data using the Canny Edge Detection algorithm, chosen for its superior noise handling, hysteresis thresholding and precise edge localization compared with simpler operators. The aeromagnetic data, collected in 2007 with cesium vapour magnetometers along 500-meter flight lines, were corrected for the International Geomagnetic Reference Field and reduced to the equator before edge detection. The composite analysis revealed 6,683 lineaments dominated by a northeast-southwest trend, matching the known structural grain of the Benue Trough, with the highest lineament densities, up to 3.89 per square kilometer, concentrated along the southeastern margins of the study area.

Geology complicates the picture considerably. Parts of the area sit on crystalline basement rocks of the Eastern Nigerian Basement complex, which are inherently poor aquifers with limited porosity and permeability; groundwater there exists only where weathering and fracturing have created secondary porosity. Other portions lie within the sedimentary fill of the Benue Trough, including the Eze-Aku formation’s sandstones and shales, where aquifers are unconfined, variable in thickness, and modest in yield. Boreholes in the sedimentary terrain rarely exceed 0.3 liters per second, though optimal yields of 4 to 12 liters per second have been reported where brittle structures such as faults and fractures are intercepted. Aquifer thickness across the study area ranged from just 4.4 meters to a substantial 96.7 meters.

To fuse these disparate data streams into a single map, the team turned to the Analytical Hierarchy Process, a pairwise comparison method that converts expert judgment into consistent numerical weights. Seven factors were weighed against one another: lithology, composite lineament density, hydraulic conductivity, transmissivity, aquifer thickness, longitudinal conductance and aquifer resistivity. Lineament density emerged as the dominant control, carrying a weight of 33 percent, while aquifer thickness was least influential at 4 percent. The consistency ratio of the pairwise matrix was 0.08, comfortably below the 0.1 threshold that would signal arbitrary judgments. The weighted layers were then overlaid in ArcGIS to generate a groundwater potential map classifying the land as low, moderate or high potential.

The results are striking in their asymmetry. Low and moderate potential zones together cover roughly 87 percent of the study area, coinciding with basement complex lithology and clay-rich shale terrain where lineament density, transmissivity and conductance are all unfavorable. The high potential zone, by contrast, occupies only about 417 square kilometers, or 13 percent of the area, and clusters along the floodplains of the Katsina-Ala River, where dense lineaments intersect permeable sandstone, alluvium and fractured basement. This spatial coincidence confirms the river’s role as a primary recharge source and suggests that the most promising ranching locations are also the most hydrologically sensitive.

The model’s credibility rests on two independent checks. Validated against thirteen borehole yield records, the map correctly classified 84.61 percent of observations, a strong result the authors temper by noting the limited number of validation points. A sensitivity analysis then perturbed each factor weight by plus or minus twenty percent across fourteen scenarios, rescaling the remaining weights each time. The high-potential area shifted by at most 5.62 percent, in response to changes in lineament density, confirming that the map is robust and that lineament density is simultaneously the most influential and the most uncertainty-carrying input. Transmissivity, hydraulic conductivity and aquifer thickness each induced changes below three percent.

The practical implications are considerable. The 417 square kilometers of high-potential ground constitute a spatial blueprint for ranch siting, offering state and federal governments an evidence-based alternative to politically fraught land allocations. The authors argue the map can serve as a neutral arbiter, reframing disputes between pastoralists and farmers as collaborative planning for shared resource security. Yet they are candid about the limits of hydrogeology. The high-potential zones are not empty: they include active farmsteads at Mbacher and Iwar and built-up areas such as Ikurav-Tiev and Katsina-Ala Township, so siting ranches there without resolving land tenure could displace rather than dissolve the conflict.

There is also an environmental paradox at the heart of the plan. Concentrating cattle on the Katsina-Ala floodplains, precisely where aquifer recharge is strongest, risks contaminating the very groundwater the ranches depend on, with nitrate and pathogen leaching from ranch effluent a particular concern. The researchers recommend a groundwater quality monitoring network, legally demarcated recharge protection zones, lined waste containment systems and integrated manure management as preconditions for any development. Their conclusion is measured: the map provides a scientifically robust foundation for the difficult conversations ahead, but it cannot replace them. Solving Nigeria’s farmer-herder crisis, the study suggests, will require pairing precise earth science with equally careful attention to land governance, equity and trust.

Subject of Research: Groundwater potential mapping for ranch site selection to mitigate farmer-herder conflict in the Central Benue Valley, Nigeria

Article Title: Multi-factor amalgam for subterranean water prognostication: ramifications for grazier-agrarian conflict resolution in water-scant Central Benue Valley

Article References: Ayua, K. J., Akbar, A. J., & Ilozobhie, A. J. (2026). Multi-factor amalgam for subterranean water prognostication: ramifications for grazier-agrarian conflict resolution in water-scant Central Benue Valley. BMC Environmental Science, 3(1), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44329-025-00043-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44329-025-00043-5

Keywords: groundwater potential, hydrogeology, Benue Valley, farmer-herder conflict, Analytical Hierarchy Process, vertical electrical sounding, lineament density, remote sensing, GIS, ranch siting, Nigeria, water scarcity