Are world’s 200 million pastoral herders a climate threat?

In early 2020, just before the world locked down, I was in Ethiopia as a journalist, documenting the challenges faced by a tribe of nomadic pastoralists that has made its home in the Danakil Desert for over 1,000 years. About 1.5 million Afar tribespeople migrate across an area larger than Ireland – and often called the hottest and driest place on Earth – with their camels, cattle, sheep, and goats to wherever grass happens to be growing at any given time. 

I found some of the threats to their way of life to be region-specific, such as armed conflict with an aggressive