Samira Patel writes about Ladakh where climate change migration affects migration on both a short-term and longer-term basis.
Ladakh is a case study in how climate change migration is not just an issue of mass displacement from intensifying natural disasters, but how climactic change can be a gradual process. With such changes, migration is simply a fact of life and another form of adaptation, not an impending disaster.
Samira Patel
Ladakh is a small region where a myriad of mountain ranges meet – the Karakorum to the north, the Tibetan Plateau to the east, and it lies nestled within the Western Himalayas. Historically, Ladakh was located at a bustling intersection of Silk Road trade, but it is now situated at the crossroads of three countries – China, India and Pakistan – and at two contested borders. It is in one of the main districts of this region in the Indian Himalayas that I found myself walking with a professor from the University of Ladakh. We were at an altitude of about 12,000 feet and he pointed to the line of mountains directly across from us where the Indian tectonic plate meets the Eurasian plate.
In many places the history of the landscape might not be immediately obvious, but here in Ladakh, a high-altitude desert, such things feel rather stark. As a well-known Ladakh historian, Janet Rizvi, said: “Here the bones of the earth not only protrude through the mantle which life has cast over them…but are given only the scantiest covering.”
Later, the professor joked with me that this meant anyone living South of this convergence would lose 20 seconds from their commute every year as the Indian plate pushes against the Eurasian plate, moving northeast at about 5cm/year.
While he was being facetious, his anecdote spoke to the idea of thinking about how the earth moves in relation to our own daily migrations and movements. As climate change intensifies, we see across the world how various natural disasters are transforming communities and displacing large swaths of people. But these do not occur in a vacuum. In Ladakh, people have long been attuned to migratory patterns, not just their own as the home of a critical pastoralist community, but also of the ecosystem surrounding it. People have noticed the migration of insects slowly moving north to Ladakh, sometimes bringing infectious disease, just as other plants and animals also continue to shift with the climate. This is a place that simultaneously requires people to be responsive to the smallest of changes, and yet resilient to the most drastic of them.
Ladakh is unusual in the Himalayas because it is in the rain shadow of the monsoon, which means it receives limited rain during the year and relies primarily on glaciers for water and energy. At the same time, it is undergoing changes that have resonances in many parts of the world. It is experiencing unusual flooding, glacier retreat, drought, less snow every year and environmental degradation.
This is paralleled by changes in human movements, with more tourists arriving every summer, less agropastoralism as grazing lands become crowded and smaller, out-migration for education and labour, and militarisation of the border area. Humans are impacting the landscape and ecosystem and in turn environmental changes are impacting human livelihoods.
To and fro
Historically, the easternmost part of Ladakh, the Changthang Plateau, has been home to the Changpa pastoralists who have long traversed the Tibetan plateau with yaks, sheep and pashmina goats. These communities congregate around the large lakes of the region, enmeshed within diverse wetland ecosystems, but migrate along the open valleys, following various grassland routes as small rains, snowmelt and glacier patterns determine the seasonal cycles of grazing.
These grazing periods are broken into a series of micro-migrations, short 10 to 15-day durations, which have, over time, become shorter due to the declining availability of grass in a single location at any given time. Pastoralist units have become smaller over time as well, and just one couple could be responsible for managing 600 goats, for example. These groups average about 8-15 location shifts per year, depending on multiple factors.
When I spoke with pastoralists and organisations working with them, the immediate concern seemed to be how to transition the communities from primarily pastoralist livelihoods to permanent settlements and to other forms of income generation – tourism, military, farming, etc. Pastoralism is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain when borders are closed, and younger generations are foregoing it entirely.
In particular, with the China-India border conflict of 1962 (and subsequent conflicts), thousands of Tibetan refugees fled to the Changthang region of Ladakh, and the reinforced border forced Ladakhi Changpas to also leave behind winter grazing lands near or beyond the border. Furthermore, the militarisation of the area, road-building and other development activities, including tourism, have limited grazing areas and changed incentive structures for the pastoralist lifestyle.
Yet, for some the income earned from pashmina goat wool is extremely lucrative. The transhumance [the seasonal movement of livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures] of these goats in extreme cold and high altitudes produces very fine, soft wool, popularly known as cashmere. Managing the grazing lands is extremely important, not only for the health of the herds and the livelihoods of countless people, but also for the ecosystem of the area. For example, changes in herd composition impacts manure availability for agricultural purposes. Diverse manure also helps to maintain microfauna to improve bird foraging, especially for the near threatened black-necked crane.
Ladakhi people used to rely on a traditional form of land management, called the ‘goba’ system. A local appointed leader, the ‘goba’, would help coordinate where different families and their herds ought to graze, to keep any one area from overgrazing and to assimilate information regarding weather, rains and snow, in order to help guide herding families. They also served as go-betweens between government and communities, serving as an impartial party focused on local concerns.
Over time, this system has been layered with other forms of governance. The Changthang area is now a protected wetland conservation area that the Ladakh Wildlife Department manages, sometimes in conflict with the concerns of the Changpa. Ladakh has a storied history of different administrations governing the land from afar – including via Tibet, Kashmir, and most recently, Delhi. Ladakh is a Union Territory, which means that, unlike parts of India that have statehood, it is administered by the central Indian government. Ladakh’s most local body is the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, which works with a different set of local leaders from the traditional goba system to manage issues of health, agriculture, herding, tourism and other livelihood concerns.
However, because of these confusing layers of bureaucracy, it is no longer clear who can help manage what and less and less people rely on the goba system to manage the rangelands. This makes it very difficult to understand landscape and environmental changes at the very local and micro level as the people who understand it best are least consulted.
The path forward
Because climate change and migration are regarded as extra-regional in nature, spilling over borders, often nations turn to regional and global mechanisms to manage them. Nationally, both are often managed as issues of national security, which often happens at the expense of local considerations. Rather than consider migration policy at the point of a border, a more nuanced approach would be for policies to take into consideration small-scale migrations, which, over time, add up to large-scale movements. This requires taking a holistic approach to the migrations within an ecosystem, from how the glaciers, grasses and goats are all shifting, and how that in turn impacts how people move or need to move with them.
This also means that climate policy should account for migration issues and migration policy needs to account for climate issues. The connection is not always immediately obvious, but people on the ground know how their environments are changing and the extent to which it is sustainable for their futures. This is not to say that communities have a singular perspective – often there is contention between pro-development forces, conservation forces and everyone in between, and communities themselves are constantly negotiating and shifting.
However, there are nuances only those who live in a specific place can understand. In Ladakh, strengthening local representation and participation, especially of those who best understand the changing landscape, can help build better climate policies, while addressing the needs of the region. It also means building support structures for migratory multispecies communities to sustain their work. This includes building organisational infrastructure to increase responsiveness to issues like drought and human-wildlife conflicts and building economic models that integrate pastoralist traditions.
Ladakh is a case study in how climate change migration is not just an issue of mass displacement from intensifying natural disasters, but how climactic change can be a gradual process. With such changes, migration is simply a fact of life and another form of adaptation, not an impending disaster.
*Samira Patel [2022] is doing a PhD in Polar Studies.
