2.3. Study area
Case study selection
The province of Namibe is located Southwest of Angola, bordering Namibia, and hosts about 1,200,000 people. The main activity of rural people is animal farming, mostly goats and cows, with official statistics estimating the cattle size to 500.500 heads (Angola, 2013). However, the remote location of the largest cattle keepers and their semi-nomadic nature linked to mobile transhumance practices make it difficult to reliably quantify. In this area, cows are considered much more than a subsistence mean or a financial and capital, but they represent a “spiritual capital”, connecting people to their ancestors (Bagnol and Verhoesel, 2009). For this reason, taking care of the animals is the main activity of the Namibian pastoral communities, who also keep animals in close proximity to their families. Farms (sambos) are usually embedded within the clans’ settlements (kimbos), surrounded by a larger area where family houses and other facilities are spread. Within the Mukubal, the largest cattle keepers populating mostly the Virei area, the lives of people and animals are so intertwined and co-dependent that the settlements are even called just sambos.
The scarce and increasingly unpredictable rainfall make Namibe prone to long droughts and extensive water scarcity, which are already severely affecting the livelihood of local communities (Limones et al., 2020). Local communities have traditionally been practicing transhumance to cope with water scarcity and land degradation, by seasonally reaching locations with higher availability of resources for their livestock (Carvalho, 1974). However, climate change is worsening the hydro-climatic conditions of the areas, forcing local communities to change and prolong their transhumance routes with increasing risk of failure (Herrero et al., 2016).
The ten communities involved in this study are located in three different sub-municipal divisions (the comunas of Cainde, Capangombe and Lola), spanning across different socio-economic and agro-climatic areas in a north-south gradient, from the southern semi-arid livestock-based communities of Cainde, to the agro-pastoralist communities of sub-humid Lola. Capturing the social-ecological gradient of the ten communities is fundamental to understand the different socio-economic conditions for siting sand dams along the most important transhumance route of the Province. The three comunas are in fact connected by the virtual cattle road that brings pastoralist from drier areas to greener and more humid areas. The light grey area in Figure 2 is the official administrative territory of the communities, which have their own local soba, but it often extends further beyond those boundaries to include further pasture and water points, which transhumant pastoralists are extremely dependent on (Mufinda et al., 2015).