Abstract
Certification schemes for agriculture aim to incentivize sustainable land management. To be credible, they need robust metrics to assess the practices of producers. We demonstrate an approach for evaluating practice, which is repeatable and explicitly representative of stakeholders. We apply it to nomadic pastoralism in Mongolia, where livestock overgrazing is of concern. Our approach uses judgements from stakeholders about the sustainability of hypothetical but realistic herding scenarios. From these, we create models to predict sustainability scores. These can be applied as tools to assess the actual practices of herders. We use two judgement datasets: one representing producers’ judgements, another a subset that also conforms to the environmental expectations of the certifier. The differences must be negotiated when we choose evaluation methods. The approach could be used for any production system, provided variables are devised that summarize practice and appropriate stakeholders are available to judge the sustainability of different practices.
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Data availability
All data are provided via Mendeley Data at https://doi.org/10.17632/c6vnd2wjkg.2.
Code availability
All code used in this work is provided via Mendeley Data at https://doi.org/10.17632/rrmkf32v5p.1. The assessment tool is also available online at https://canranliu.shinyapps.io/Assessment_of_sustainability_of_herding_practice/.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the funders of this work for their support: the administration of Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières (AVSF), who dedicated funds derived from the Fonds Français pour l’Environnement Mondial (French Facility for Global Environment). We thank the numerous stakeholders who gave their time and knowledge to this project by participating in our workshops. Specifically, we thank the herders who came to the regional centres of Bayankhongor, Bumbugur, Shinejinst, Bayantsagaan and Bogd in August 2022 and the herders, scientists and policymakers who attended the workshop in Ulaanbaatar in August 2022. We also thank our field teams who arranged travel, food and documentation and assisted with workshop logistics, particularly G. Touati (AVSF), M. Lelarge (AVSF), Q. Moreau (AVSF), E. Narmandakh (Mongolian Academy of Sciences) and D. Odsuren (Bayalag Eco).
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K.O. and B.R. initiated the work and arranged funding within AVSF. S.J.S. and K.B., with assistance from M.D.W. and K.O., designed the study. K.B. designed and implemented the simulations to create plausible practice scenarios. O.A. and B.R. organized all stakeholder consultations and travel logistics. K.B., O.A., B.A., S.J.S. and M.D.W. conducted all consultations in Mongolia and subsequently compiled the data. K.B. was the primary facilitator in all consultation sessions. B.A, B.R., D.J.M. and A.E. were among the stakeholders who provided their judgements. C.L., with some assistance from S.J.S. and K.B., conducted all modelling and analyses and prepared the code and final data for archiving. K.B. and S.J.S. prepared the figures. S.J.S. wrote the manuscript, with advice and assistance from M.D.W., C.L., K.B, D.J.M., A.E. and K.O., both before submission and during the review process.
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Two authors have potential competing financial interests as defined by Nature Research that might be perceived to influence the interpretation of the article. B.R. and B.A. are employed by Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans Frontières (AVSF), the organization that funded this work and that is overseeing the development of the S3C certification scheme, the subject of this work. The authors have no non-financial competing interests to declare.
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Sinclair, S.J., Batpurev, K., Liu, C. et al. Certifying the sustainability of herding practices in Mongolia. Nat Sustain 8, 245–255 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01511-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01511-1
