The Taij Khairkhan Declaration

We, the scholars, herders, and practitioners participating in the “Nomadic Futures: Cultural Rights, Knowledge Systems, Climate Resilience” conference at Taij Khairkhan, Mongolia, convened by the International Institute for the Study of Nomadic Civilizations under the auspices of UNESCO,

Acknowledging the international recognition of mobile pastoralists through actions to mark the UN International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (2026);

Affirming the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007), which asserts the rights to self-determination, traditional lands, and distinct cultural institutions, including, for nomadic communities, the practice of mobility itself;

Recognizing the calls for rights and recognition and action presented in the 2024 UN Special Rapporteur’s Report on Mobile Indigenous Peoples,¹ the 2024 Sardi International Workshop on Camelid Pastoralism,² the 2007 Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights,³ the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001),⁴ the Dana Declaration on Mobile Peoples and Conservation (2002)⁵ and Dana+20 Manifesto (2022),⁶ the 2024 Statement on Nomadic Ethics and Intercultural Dialogue,⁷ the Global Declaration of Young Pastoralists (2026),⁸ the Kathmandu Declaration of Pastoralist Women (2026),⁹ and the Nomads Red Line Initiative for Sustainable Pasture Rights (2026),¹⁰ which together affirm mobility as a right and mobile peoples as partners in land stewardship;

Welcoming UNESCO’s inscription on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity of “Transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock” (2023), “Mongol nomadic migration and its associated practices” (2024), “Traditional knowledge and skills in making Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Karakalpak yurts” (2025), and 24 other distinct cultural practices and expressions of intangible heritage that are directly associated with mobile pastoralism, confirming that mobile pastoralism – including its spiritual beliefs and practices – is already recognized as heritage worth protecting, not merely a livelihood to be managed;

Underlining the importance of building on this foundation and extending it into the specific arena of climate finance;

Address this declaration to the Parties assembled at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Our message

The combined effect of climate change and market-driven transformations of animal production and land use are major drivers of land degradation, while also contributing to increased temperatures, soil erosion, decreasing soil moisture, changing precipitation patterns, wildfires, and other impacts on vegetation, biodiversity, and the atmosphere. Mobile pastoralism–rangeland systems are heavily impacted by these effects.¹¹ Degradation and desertification are not only crises of the soil, but also crises in the relationship between people and land. As the Elders of Indigenous and mobile pastoralist communities teach, this relationship is one of reciprocity and deep responsibility, guided by traditional knowledge and practices that, in many mobile pastoralist communities, encompass sacred teachings, ritual, and ceremony. Where this relationship has been sustained for generations through mobility, flexibility, and the accumulated knowledge of pastoralist communities, grasslands have remained healthy. Where mobility has been restricted, fragmented, or prohibited, both the land and the bonds that care for it have degraded.

Pastoralism is not simply livestock-raising that happens to involve movement. It is a specialized strategy for turning environmental unpredictability into opportunity – tracking scattered, shifting resources across space and time rather than trying to fix and control them. For decades, misguided development policy treated pastoralism as a stage to be outgrown, promoting settlement and fixed-land ranching as modern alternatives. In the face of climate change – with climate variability increasing and the growing risk of triggering tipping points in natural systems – this vision of modernization is now obsolete. The systems built for stability, which rely on fossil fuels, are most at risk, while those built to work with climate variability are best fit for the future.

The evidence is clear: pastoral mobility more often enhances biodiversity and resilience than diminishes them. Mobility is a climate-compatible strategy already proven at scale that keeps people, herds, and land in living relationships.

Mobile pastoralism and mobility practices to be recognized and financed¹²

We call on Parties to finance mobility as a dynamic range of processes, refined over generations and continuously adjusted to the rhythms of variable landscapes. These processes require freedom and unimpeded movement, and include (but are not limited to): routine seasonal movements and migrations; mountain transhumance; movement between pasture and water sources; flexible herd movements in response to foraging and hunting opportunities; emergency access to short-term grazing; and movement across administrative boundaries.

Mobility also requires access to primary and reserve pastures, natural water sources, springs, wells, winter, spring, summer, and autumn camps, seasonal routes, and sacred mountains, cairns (ovoo), pilgrimage routes, and other spiritually important sites. Mobility further depends on maintaining herd integrity across generations; flexibility in the timing of production and culling in response to variable social-ecological conditions; access to digital information and off-grid renewable energy; and the ability to maintain native breeds adapted to arid and desert environments, notably camelids.

These processes, including the institutions that support them, are essential to the health of rangeland-pastoralism systems. Therefore, they need to be financed as a whole.

Calls to action

We call on Parties to:

1. Redirect climate finance toward enabling the self-determination of mobile pastoralist peoples and support mobile pastoralism itself as the direct object of investment. Legally recognize customary tenure, including access to seasonal grazing lands, sacred sites, water points, and mobility across administrative boundaries, including the flexible and informal mechanisms through which herders already manage variability.

2. Legally recognize and protect customary mobile land tenure systems and mobility rights as a precondition for rangeland health, keeping the relationship between herd, herder, and landscape intact rather than allowing it to be divided by competing land uses. Legal protections must extend to mobile pastoralist minorities within majority nation-states, not only to communities recognized as Indigenous under UNDRIP; otherwise these protections will remain inaccessible to a significant share of the world’s pastoralists.¹³

3. Require free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and social and cultural impact assessment¹⁴ wherever mining, crop agriculture, or other land uses threaten herders’ rights to their territories and homelands, recognizing that damage to sacred sites and migration routes is a form of harm no economic gain can offset. Free, prior and informed consent includes the right to withhold consent, and any such refusal must be respected.

4. Ban the forced relocation, resettlement, or sedentarization of pastoralist and nomadic communities. Because the cultural, spiritual, and knowledge systems of mobile peoples are bound to specific landscapes – particular pastures, water sources, migration routes, and sacred sites – they rely on ties that cannot be relocated or reconstituted elsewhere, even with financial compensation. No restoration project, conservation designation, extractive concession, carbon or offset scheme, or climate adaptation programme may proceed on terms that displace a pastoralist community from its territory.

5. Recognize and finance mobile pastoralism as intangible cultural heritage, allocating dedicated climate-resilience funding to safeguard the knowledge and practices associated with it through UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage mechanisms, and supporting States Parties developing nominations and safeguarding plans for new inscriptions. The cultural heritage of mobile pastoralism also includes the domestic animal biodiversity that pastoralists develop, maintain, and adapt over generations. Livestock breed diversity is a cultural heritage, repository of tacit knowledge, and an ecological asset that requires additional direct financing.

6. Cease incentivizing and privileging intensive, fossil-fuel-dependent livestock systems in policies. Regulate livestock markets, investment, and value-chain development to ensure that market engagement serves first and foremost to strengthen pastoralists’ capacity to practise pastoralism, rather than driving sedentarization, production intensification, breed standardization, or the fragmentation of rangelands.

7. Give pastoralists the authority to conduct climate monitoring, treating herders not as subjects of adaptation policy but as its co-authors, and recognizing cultural leaders as keepers of the observational and spiritual knowledge on which that monitoring rests.

8. Invest in young herders and heritage bearers, who sustain the present and future of mobile pastoralism, and address the conditions that drive them from pastoralism and towards cities, recognizing that a tradition of mobility broken in transmission cannot be restored by finance alone.

9. Invest in the protection of sacred landscapes, cultural landscapes, and material cultural heritage by creating a mechanism that directly funds mobile pastoralism. Conduct impact assessments on cultural landscapes and other sites where cultural and natural values are closely interwoven.¹⁵

10. Establish and enforce legal accountability, including criminal liability where warranted, for public and private entities that destroy, pollute, or degrade rangeland-pastoralism systems through mining, commercial agriculture, chemical contamination, waste dumping, or other harmful activities. Apply the polluter-pays principle by requiring responsible entities to remove pollution and contaminants, restore affected landscapes, and compensate for harm to human and animal health and to rangeland-pastoralism systems.

The relationship between mobile pastoralist herders and their lands, pastures, water sources, sacred sites, and migration routes must be recognized and protected as a cultural right. Rangelands and pastoralism systems are not separate entities to be managed independently; they form a single, co-evolving system whose health rests on the interaction of mobility and variability. Funding land restoration while restricting the mobility that sustains it runs counter to the very outcome the UN Convention to Combat Desertification seeks.

We ask the Parties to remember that caring for the land is a sacred trust, and that the movements of pastoral peoples are among the oldest forms of that care. Supporting pastoralism to persist on its own terms is one of the most direct paths to combat desertification.

Presented on behalf of the participants of the “Nomadic Futures: Cultural Rights, Knowledge Systems, and Climate Resilience” conference.

Notes