Modeling scale and variability in human–environmental interactions in Inner Asia

Pastoralism represents a complex adaptive system that has existed in Inner Asia for thousands of years. The challenges of environmental change have highlighted the need to assess the potential for long-term sustainability while also considering the characteristics of systems that have the potential to maintain resilience. Here we assess the interaction between slow and fast processes and how interpretations of adaptive capacity and system resilience are affected by the scale at which observations are made. Agent-based modeling is used to identify the social and demographic interactions between landscape and weather variability for pastoralists in Inner Asia at a variety of social scales and from temporal scales of societal change ranging from a few days to 1000 years. Results indicate that the scale of abrupt changes may not be proportional to the severity or duration of the weather event, but is highly impacted by internal social factors. At the scale of individual families, highly interconnected social systems with less mobility and restricted decision making are less effective. When viewed from the vantage point of larger social units, highly interconnected kinship systems and restrictions in access to land may serve purposes that are counterproductive for individual families.