Title Modeling Pastoralist Movement In
Title Modeling pastoralist movement in response to environmental variables and conflict in Somaliland: Combining agent-based modeling and geospatial data Authors Erica L Nelson¹,3, Saira A Khan¹, Swapna Thorve², Gregg Greenough¹,3 ¹ Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University, Cambridge USA ² Department of Computer Science at University of Virginia, Charlottesville USA 3 Harvard Medical School, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston USA Key Words Agent-based modeling, geo-spatial, environment, conflict, pastoralists, migration, Somaliland Abstract Pastoralism is widely practiced in arid and semi-arid lands and is the primary means of livelihood for approximately 268 million people across Africa. Critical environmental, interpersonal, and transactional variables such as vegetation and water availability, conflict and ethnic tensions, and private/public land delineation influence the movements of these populations across space and time. The challenges of climate change and conflict are widely observed by nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, particularly in the regions of Somaliland and Puntland, where resources are scarce, natural disasters are increasingly common, a protracted conflict has plagued communities for decades, and over 65% of the population rely on pastoralism as a primary livelihood. Bereft of necessary, real-time data, researchers and programmatic personnel often turn to post hoc analysis to create an understanding of the interaction between climate, conflict, and migration, and design programs to address the needs of nomadic pastoralists and those that drop out of pastoralism in search for alternate livelihoods. By designing an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that simulates the movement of nomadic pastoralists based on aggregated, typologically-diverse, historical data of environmental, interpersonal, and transactional variables in Somaliland and Puntland between 2008 and 2018, this study intends to identify how pastoralists respond to complex, changing environments over time.
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