Over-reliance on water infrastructure can erode resilience of drylands pastoralists

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of droughts across drylands, with negative consequences on local communities. Small water infrastructure (e.g. wells, ponds and small dams) are increasingly supported by many NGOs and national governments to increase water availability and help pastoralists cope with the effects of climate change. However, as opposed to large dams, very little is known about the potential cumulative impact of small water infrastructures and their cascading effects on the resilience of pastoral communities. Pastoralists of drylands across the world, who constitute large, marginalized groups in many low-income countries, practice mobility as one of the main adaptation strategies to water variability and uncertainty. Here we show that while developing fixed water points in dryland can provide additional water to pastoral communities, these short-term benefits can be offset by counterintuitive long-term effects such as the erosion of mobility practices and over-reliance on agriculture, thus decreasing resilience to climate change. Combining system dynamics and resilience thinking approaches, we explain the complex consequences of different water resource development strategies and their long-term cascading effects on the resilience of pastoral communities. We then show how our model can capture early signals of resilience loss in Angolan drylands, where water infrastructures are being planned at a large-scale in the pursuit of increasing climate resilience, with unclear long-term understanding of the effects of socio-hydrological dynamics on communities’ resilience.