Introduction: Pastoral resilience in a changing world in the Hindu Kush Himalaya

The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) spans from China and Myanmar in the east to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the west, covering 4.3 million square kilometres. Rangelands account for about sixty per cent of region (Stoddart et al. 1975). These rangelands are important parts of four global biodiversity hotspots, namely Indo-Burma, Eastern Himalaya, Southwest China and the Mountains of Central Asia (Mittermeier et al. 2011). They provide ecosystem services to both the people in the region and the 1.3 billion people living downstream. They serve as vital habitats for many rare, endangered, endemic and iconic wildlife species such as the snow leopard, Marco Polo sheep and black-necked crane (Dong et al. 2023); play a significant role in global biodiversity conservation; and harbour rich medicinal plants and valuable alpine herbs like Ophiocordyceps sinensis (Shrestha et al. 2017) which are extremely important for local livelihoods. Besides providing feed for diverse wildlife and millions of livestock, the rangelands provide vital services such as water regulation, pollination, pest and disease regulation, and fire risk management; can potentially aid climate regulation function by serving as major carbon sinks; and provide intangible benefits in the form of spiritual, aesthetic, recreational and tourism services. Over 25–30 million people of different indigenous and other communities (Joshi et al. 2020) inhabit these rangelands and directly depend on them for livelihood and subsistence. One of the communities whose livelihood and cultural survival are inextricably tied to these rangelands is pastoralists.