Home, Home … on Less Range

Estimates of how much California rangeland (yellow) could be lost to climate change by 2100. Among the other landscapes illustrated are conifer forests (green), desert shrub (light brown), woody shrub growth (pink), oak woodlands (purple) and hardwood forests (blue).

To see how thoroughly the concept of ecosystem services — the economic analysis of the natural world’s intersection with human endeavors — is embedded in climate change research, check out this forecast from a group led by researchers at Duke University and the Environmental Defense Fund. It examines the future of cattle ranching, an industry that is bound up with America’s self-image, thanks to Hollywood, pulp novels and Cormac McCarthy, through the lens of a climate-changed California landscape. It concludes that, whether the state’s climate becomes warmer and wetter or warmer and drier, it will be more expensive to raise cattle because there will be less forage to sustain the animals. Significant amounts of forage — nature’s free “service” to the cattlemen — will either be dessicated (under the warmer and drier projection) as the arid conditions in southeastern California inch northward or will be replaced by less-digestible scrub and brush (under the warmer and wetter projection), the study projects. The loss will cost California ranchers tens of millions of dollars annually if it is warmer and wetter over the next 60 years or so, and $123 million to $209 million a year if it is warmer and drier, the article suggests. In coming decades, “there will be fewer places to graze cattle and cattle grazing lands will be less productive,” said Linwood Pendleton, one of the study’s lead authors, an ecosystems services specialist at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “And because we’ve built up cities and highways around them, there’s nowhere to move to.”...more