Community wellbeing moderates drought adaptation in South African rangelands

Climate change is triggering diverse responses from communities across environmental and socioeconomic contexts. In African rangelands, selling livestock is critical for adapting to changes in environmental conditions. As these decisions further affect environmental and community wellbeing, identifying where, when, and how livestock sales are expected to respond to particular climatic shifts is important for delineating the total impact of climate change and responding accordingly. Scattered evidence suggests that socioeconomic wellbeing moderates how communities use cattle sales in response to precipitation. However, this has not been quantified as a generalizable trend across spatial and temporal scales. This study examines the relationship between socioeconomic wellbeing (using a standard deprivation index), precipitation, and monthly cattle slaughtering across South Africa from 2015 to 2022. We find that in better-off provinces (−1 standard deviation of deprivation), expected cattle slaughtering declined from 73,296 (90 % CI: 38,430–130,709) under the highest observed precipitation, to 57,897 (90 % CI: 30,431–103,378) in response to the lowest observed precipitation. In contrast, worse-off provinces (+1 standard deviation), increased expected cattle slaughtering from 10,306 (90 % CI: 5916–19,753) under high precipitation, to 19,966 (90 % CI: 11,437–38,245) after low precipitation. We further investigate this dynamic using a novel statistical disaggregation procedure, showing similar effects at a 16-km scale for the year 2020 and producing high-resolution estimates of where slaughtering was most likely given socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Our findings show that poorer communities are more likely to sell cattle in response to drought, a practice that can erode long-term resilience and deepen inequities.