UNCORRECTED PROOF Riders under storms: Contributions of nomadic herders’ observations to analysing climate change in Mongolia Andrei Marin * Institute of Geography, University of Bergen, P.O. Box 7800, 5020 Bergen, Norway 1. Introduction There is unequivocal evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing, very likely due to anthropogenic forces (IPCC, 2007a). There is, nevertheless, far larger uncertainty about how the climate is changing and what impacts these changes will have (Dessai et al., 2007). At regional and local levels this uncertainty results in an ‘uncertainty explosion’ (Jones, 2000; Nichols et al., 2004), hampering locally relevant analyses of the impacts of, and possible adaptations to climate change. The present article argues that the integration of local observations recorded by resource-dependent people (in this case the Mongolian pastoral nomads), can significantly reduce the uncertainty of climate change predictions and models in two ways. Firstly, local people’s observations and meteorological records can test the confidence in downscaled models, especially where competing predictions are proposed. For the arid part of Mongolia general circulation models (GCM) predict a doubling of precipita- tion by 2040 (Natsagdorj, 2000), while the analysis of meteor- ological records shows drastic reduction since 2000, yet no statistically significant long-term trend. The herders themselves present the period after 2000 as an increasingly dry period, with 2004–2007 as the worst drought spell in living memory. Secondly, an assessment of change starting with land users’ perceptions may reveal parameters salient to understanding local climate change but which are either ignored by or inaccessible to standard climatological analyses. Herders identified changes in the spatial distribution of rains, their timing and intensity as the most Global Environmental Change xxx (2009) xxx–xxx 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 29 August 2008 Received in revised form 3 September 2009 Accepted 12 October 2009 Keywords: Climate change Mongolia Indigenous knowledge Ethnometeorology Astoralism Impacts Vulnerability ABSTRACT Predictions of climate change and its impacts are highly uncertain at regional and local levels. Downscaled models often operate with a too coarse scale and look at standard parameters that may be irrelevant to resource-dependent people. This article argues that a more robust analysis and prediction of climate change at local levels can be inferred from the integration of local people’s observation of change with meteorological records and models. The example proposed here is the analysis of climate change in the desert-steppe region of Mongolia. While regional models and local analyses agree that Mongolia has become warmer, predictions either ignore or are contradictory about the changes in precipitations and sand storms. The Mongolian pastoral nomads on the other hand identify longer and more intense droughts and sand storms as the most important recent climatic changes, relevant to their livelihoods. In addition, they record detailed changes in the precipitations regime. Thus, they are unequivocal that rains have become patchy – ‘silk embroidery rains’ – (forcing pastoralists to move farther and more frequently), more intense (thus less effective due to runoff) and that summer rains are delayed (reducing the growing season). The observations of the pastoralists can only partly be investigated in light of meteorological records due to different parameters observed by the two systems. Nevertheless, additional evidence derived from the analysis of meteorological records resonates with the perceptions of the herders and adds elements for further investigation. This combined evidence suggests that due to a southern shift of the East Asian Monsoon, rains in southern Mongolia rely on re-circulated local moisture, leading to large- scale droughts and in turn more frequent sand storms. The analysis provided herein shows that combining the two knowledge systems (local people’s observations and climatology) holds the potential to provide more reliant and relevant investigations of climate change and allow for better planned adaptations. ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. * Tel.: +47 5558 3079; fax: +47 5558 3099. E-mail address: andrei.marin@geog.uib.no. G Model JGEC 732 1–15 Please cite this article in press as: Marin, A., Riders under storms: Contributions of nomadic herders’ observations to analysing climate change in Mongolia. Global Environ. Change (2009), doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.10.004 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Global Environmental Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gloenvcha 0959-3780/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.10.004 As