Resilient and Equitable Nature-based Pathways in Southern African Rangelands (REPAiR)

Rangelands cover over half of the world's land surface, play a vital role in carbon sequestration, support biodiversity, supply freshwater, and sustain billions of livelihoods based on extensive livestock production globally. While there are efforts to extend Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in rangelands, standard approaches often carry assumptions of ecological stability and linear successional dynamics which do not align with the extreme 'non-equilibrium' dynamics characteristic of many rangeland environments, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. To date, only limited research addresses the suitability and feasibility of NbS to strengthen resilience in the face of climate change in the context of communal governance and in productive non-equilibrium socio-ecological systems. New evidence, knowledge and practical tools are therefore needed for NbS to be successful in such contexts.

REPAiR aims to address these gaps by co-producing new, comparative evidence to contextualise and rethink NbS to provide a better fit for uncertain and dynamic non-equilibrium landscapes. REPAiR's geographic focus Southern Africa (SA) is in recognition that small-scale livestock farming on communally managed arid and semi-arid rangelands - also called 'drylands' - forms the backbone of vast informal agrarian economies that provide social, economic, cultural and environmental values and benefits for broader society, including ecosystem services, employment and food security. Although Southern African rangelands have clear local, national and global importance to sustainable development and potential as spaces to identify and develop equitable, community-led NbS, they are frequently misjudged to be spaces of 'problems without solutions', overstocked, inefficiently used, and ultimately degraded.

The project will use evidence from Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR), in-depth socio-ecological case studies and international knowledge exchanges to test and refine a framework that integrates the call's priority themes of contextualisation, scalability and community-led governance of NbS, as well as crosscutting concerns of equity and temporal sustainability. This builds on the idea that supporting climate resilient development pathways involving scalable, equitable, and effective governance of NbS in any setting requires a relational, whole systems approach that integrates multiple forms of knowledge, and can thus better situate NbS across spatial, temporal and policy scales. Our transdisciplinary UK-South Africa knowledge consortium builds upon long-term research and practitioner collaborations. It brings together disciplinary and thematic expertise spanning the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities, and includes arts-based practitioners, research communication specialists and two dynamic South Africa-based partner organisations. Cape Climate Collective (CcliC) and Meat Naturally Africa (MNA) bring experience, respectively, in using participatory arts-based methods, and social and ecological data from applying innovative and context-sensitive approaches to community-led NbS.

REPAiR will co-produce knowledge, tools and broader policy and societal outcomes that directly contribute to UKRI, UK government and FCDO strategies and broader global efforts to build climate and disaster risk resilience, enhance biodiversity, and to support regional policy processes related to climate adaptation. Through targeted outputs, the project will apply evidence in ways that directly bring existing NbS principles embodied in the IUCN Global Standard into greater alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals by identifying, enabling and activating context-sensitive, just and equitable climate resilient development pathways.