The study, authored by Deepak Malik, uses a qualitative historical method based on close reading and source criticism of archival material. Its evidential core consists of twelve files and proceedings of the Government of India held at the National Archives of India, five of which are analysed as cases. These are supplemented by published census and administration reports and by the existing secondary literature. The research asks three questions: through which administrative mechanisms water, land and animals were governed; how irrigation and wildlife governance were connected in practice; and how cultivators, pastoralists, intermediaries and princely states experienced and contested these arrangements.

The findings point to a shared administrative toolkit across both domains. Water and wildlife were alike governed through classification, codified rules and monetary charges or rewards, meaning that the state’s reach over rivers, fields and animals ran through the same instruments of paperwork and payment. Canal administration, meanwhile, did not operate through officials alone but worked through local intermediaries, who carried the routines of colonial rule into villages and pastures. This reliance on go-betweens shaped how authority was exercised on the ground and how local actors could engage with, or push back against, it.

The most concrete point of connection between the two domains was physical. Canal colonisation converted the scrub commons of the western doabs, the interfluve tracts between rivers, into revenue-paying fields. Those scrublands had served simultaneously as pasture for herders and as habitat for wildlife, so the extension of irrigation transformed in one stroke the economics of land, the livelihoods of pastoralists and the ecological setting in which animals were governed. The study presents this overlap as the terrain on which irrigation policy and wildlife policy met, linking the political economy of canal agriculture to the control of animals within the same landscape.

The article also registers how these arrangements were experienced from below. Cultivators, pastoralists, intermediaries and princely states appear in the analysis not as passive recipients of policy but as groups who encountered, negotiated and contested colonial rules over water, land and animals. By treating their responses as part of the evidence, the study frames colonial-state formation as a process that unfolded through encounters in the field rather than through decrees issued from above alone.

The author is explicit about the limits of the evidence. The findings establish administrative priorities more firmly than they establish ecological causation, and the archival base consists largely of English-language official records, which inevitably filter the perspectives available to the historian. Within these constraints, the study makes its contribution by joining two historiographical threads that have run separately: the history of canal irrigation in colonial Punjab and the history of wildlife governance. Read together, they suggest that the classification of land, the levying of charges and rewards, and the conversion of commons into taxable fields were not incidental side effects of empire but active ingredients in the construction of colonial authority in the province.

Subject of Research: The role of canal irrigation and wildlife governance in colonial state formation in Punjab, 1885–1932

Article Title: Environmental governance and colonial-state formation in Punjab: canal irrigation, wildlife governance, and the political economy of empire, 1885–1932

Article References: Malik, D. (2026). Environmental governance and colonial-state formation in Punjab: canal irrigation, wildlife governance, and the political economy of empire, 1885–1932. SN Social Sciences, 6(11), 582. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01889-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01889-5

Keywords: colonial Punjab, environmental governance, canal irrigation, wildlife governance, colonial state formation, political economy of empire, scrub commons, pastoralists, National Archives of India, historical method, water administration, land classification

The research comes at a critical moment. Across Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, millions of pastoralists depend on cattle, sheep and goats grazing vast semi-arid rangelands. For these communities, livestock are far more than a source of income. They function as a family’s savings account, its food security and its cultural identity, often accumulated and passed down through generations. When drought kills a herd, it does not merely erase a season’s earnings; it can liquidate decades of household wealth in a matter of months, trapping families in poverty from which recovery may take years or may never come at all.

Lead author Dr Matt Clark, a Research Associate in Sustainability Science with the Thriving Oceans Research Hub in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, described climate variability as an inequity multiplier. If forecasts prove correct and a near-record El Niño develops, he said, the team expects the event to amplify inequalities across southern African rangelands. The core problem, he explained, is not that poor farmers lack climate information. It is that they often cannot afford to act on it. Wealthier producers can reduce herd sizes ahead of drought and rebuild when conditions improve, but many small-scale pastoralists simply do not have that financial buffer. Selling animals early means selling them cheap, and a depleted herd cannot regenerate quickly when rains return.

To understand how these dynamics play out at regional scale, the researchers built a detailed computational model representing pastoral communities across seven southern African countries. The model drew on projected rainfall patterns from European climate models together with empirical data on livestock populations, vegetation dynamics and community wealth. Rather than treating the region as a homogeneous whole, the simulation captured the decisions of thousands of individual livestock farmers operating under different climate conditions and different adaptation interventions. As the model settled into a stable state, wider patterns and the trade-offs between interventions emerged from the accumulation of those individual decisions, offering a level of granularity that broad regional averages cannot provide.

The team ran three simulations. The first represented a business-as-usual future, and its results were grim: increasing rainfall variability reduced household wealth, increased livestock losses, degraded grasslands and widened the gap between rich and poor. The second tested adaptation strategies in isolation. Access to improved forecasts alone delivered only modest benefits, because many households lacked the financial capacity to respond to the information they received. Risk-smoothing measures on their own, such as supplementary feed or insurance, could help households survive but sometimes forced environmental trade-offs, for example by keeping larger herds alive on already stressed landscapes.

The third simulation examined how adaptation spreads between neighbouring communities, drawing on conservation programs such as Conservation International’s Herding for Health initiative. Its findings were among the most encouraging of the study. When practical support accompanied climate information, communities learned from one another and adoption became self-reinforcing, providing a plausible pathway for climate adaptation at scale. In other words, the combination did more than add the benefits of each component; it created a social dynamic in which adaptation practices diffused organically through networks of neighbouring households, overcoming barriers that top-down programs have long struggled to breach.

The study identifies a suite of risk-smoothing measures that can make forecasts actionable: supplementary livestock feed, drought insurance, targeted financial support and improved market access. The logic is straightforward. A forecast warning of impending drought is only useful if a farmer can afford to sell animals at a fair price, buy feed to bridge the gap, or insure the herd against loss. By combining improved access to climate information with supported risk-smoothing, the researchers found, livestock farmers can avoid the environmental trade-offs that occur when either approach is used in isolation. The combination improved livelihoods, reduced inequality and protected rangelands simultaneously, overcoming trade-offs that have long challenged climate adaptation programs.

Dr Gina Arena, Science Lead for Herding for Health at Conservation International, emphasised that the communities involved are not passive in the face of a changing climate. It is not that the people the organisations work with are not thinking about adapting, she said; it is that greater uncertainty in climate brings greater risk, and communities need help identifying the best decisions and reducing the risk of implementing them. Research of this kind, she noted, helps do exactly that. Her comments underline a recurring theme in adaptation science: the bottleneck is rarely awareness or willingness, but the capacity to absorb the cost of a wrong decision in environments where a wrong decision can be catastrophic.

For Dr Clark, one of the most hopeful aspects of the findings is that they do not depend on inventing new technology. Weather forecasting is becoming increasingly accurate, he noted, and the opportunity now is to ensure those forecasts are paired with practical support so that the people who need them most can actually benefit. The framework developed for southern African pastoralists, he added, could equally be applied in Australia and other regions facing increasingly variable rainfall. As climate extremes become more common, adaptation needs to be as much about helping people act as about improving the forecasts themselves. That reframing shifts the policy conversation from a narrow focus on meteorological precision toward the socioeconomic infrastructure that determines whether precision matters.

The research was conducted through an international collaboration involving the University of Sydney, Imperial College London, Conservation South Africa, the South African Environmental Observation Network, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of California Merced and the Santa Fe Institute. Cosima Fröhner, a former Mary Lister McCammon Fellow at Imperial College London, cautioned against dismissing the modelling as abstract, pointing out that simulating the decisions of thousands of individual farmers under different climate conditions and interventions produces something very practical: a way to see, before real lives and real herds are at stake, which combinations of support actually work and which merely shift costs elsewhere. The researchers declare no conflicts of interest, and the study received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, Research England and UK Research and Innovation. As El Niño conditions gather over the continent, the message for policymakers is unambiguous: information without the means to act is a warning unheard, and the communities least responsible for climate change remain the most exposed to its consequences unless adaptation programs close the gap between knowing and doing.

Subject of Research: Climate adaptation and inequality among pastoralist livestock farmers in southern African rangelands

Article Title: Improved climate forecasts alone won’t protect Africa’s poorest farmers

Article References: Improved climate forecasts alone won’t protect Africa’s poorest farmers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, El Niño, pastoralists, drought, rangelands, southern Africa, livestock, climate forecasts, risk-smoothing, Nature Sustainability, adaptation, inequality