Pastoralists are those peoples who depend on livestock for their livelihoods, and whose animals mainly graze or scavenge on communally-managed or open-access lands and are moved seasonally or opportunistically.

The specialized literature is increasingly pointing the notable role of non-climate drivers in making sense the vulnerability of pastoralism. In view of this and following some authors (for instance Krätli and Shareika, 2010), we propose to see pastoralism as a high-reliability system. Thus, we propose picturing pastoralism not as a coping strategy to face inadequate resource base in unpredictable environments, but as an economic activity specialized in the exploitation of irregularly distributed resources. Thus, it is not climate change by itself, but the combination of climate change with additional drivers, that is Global Environmental Change, what explains the increased vulnerability of pastoral groups to climate change and variability. That is, pastoralism when let to itself, when can be developed without external obstacles, is an activity largely reliable in front of changes and transformations, as an activity specialized in exploiting them.

Increasing evidence pastoralism is exposed to both climate and non-climate drivers. Too much focus was placed on incremental changes when dealing with the vulnerability of pastoralism to climate change. Here we expand on the particularities of the impacts and responses of pastoral value chains to extreme events. In particular we will examine: (i) the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma; (ii) the COVID-19 outbreak in the Pyrenees; and (iii) droughts in Valencia.

The Follow-the-Thing is a qualitative and situated ethnographic method appropriate to make sense social phenomena characterized by a complex array of agents and contexts (Cook, 2004). This ‘multi-sited ethnography’ is particularly appropriate to map through discontinuous contexts that share interactions. Here it is employed to participatorily map and assess the main pastoral value chains of the three case studies, to characterize and examine the relevant stakeholders, practices and barriers that play a role along pastoral value chains and the impacts on them of specific extreme events as well as the adaptation strategies developed.