Squeezed At Both Ends of the Migration: Climate Change, Land Use and Land Cover Change and the Transhumance of the Bakkarwal of Jammu and Kashmir

Abstract

The Bakkarwal are the principal long-distance nomadic pastoralists of the north-western Indian Himalaya, moving each year between winter ranges in the Shivalik foothills of Jammu and summer pastures above 3,000 m in Kashmir and Ladakh. Their transhumance exposes them to the climate and the land use of three very different landscapes in one annual cycle, yet the evidence on how those landscapes are changing has never been assembled along the migration corridor itself. This paper does so. We harvested published remote-sensing land use and land cover (LULC) change studies, station-based climate trend studies, cryosphere studies and ethnographic and survey research on the Bakkarwal, coded each estimate to the corridor zone in which it lies (winter range, Pir Panjal transit, Kashmir summer range, Ladakh) and standardised LULC change to annual rates. 104 class-level LULC estimates from 15 studies and 134 climate trend values from 29 studies were compiled. Built-up land is expanding in every study (13 of 13 estimates positive, median +4.2% of initial area per year) and horticulture in every Kashmir study (11 of 11 positive, median +1.7% a−1), forest is declining in 16 of 22 estimates, and the grazing-land classes show no consistent direction because valley-floor pasture is being lost while scrub expands on degraded forest. Annual temperature trends are positive in 44 of 45 station values, with night-time warming of +0.3 to +0.8 °C per decade strongest in the Pir Panjal transit zone, and annual precipitation is declining in 16 of 17 station values, most steeply in the summer range. Snow and glacier cover is shrinking in 7 of 8 LULC estimates and by 31% across Jammu and Kashmir since 2000. Survey evidence records a two to three week advance in departure dates, feed supplementation in more than 80% of households and sedentarisation of 14 to 39% of households. Assembled as a seasonal exposure matrix, the evidence shows a system squeezed at both ends: warming and shrinking snow pull the migration earlier while urban and horticultural expansion, fencing and evictions remove the winter range and the unowned transit pastures on which the early season depends. The paper identifies the winter range and the spring ascent, not the alpine pastures, as the segments of the corridor where climate and land-use pressures now coincide, and sets out the data gaps, above all the absence of any LULC change study for Kathua, Samba, Udhampur or Poonch, that must be closed before the corridor can be managed as a whole.