PastoralScape: An Environment-Driven Model of Vaccination Decision Making Within Pastoralist Groups in East Africa

Abstract

Economicandcultural resilienceamongpastoralists inEastAfrica is threatenedby the interconnected forces of climate change and contagious diseases spread. A key factor in the resilience of livestock dependent communities is human decision making regarding vaccination against preventable diseases such as Ri Valley fever and Contagious Bovine Pleuropneumonia. The relationship between healthy and productive livestock andeconomic development of poor households and communities ismediatedbyhumandecisionmaking. This paper describes a coupled human and natural systems agent-basedmodel that focuses onOneHealth. Disease propagation and animal nutritional health are driven by historical GIS data that captures changes in foraging condition. The results of a series of experiments arepresented thatdemonstrate the sensitivity of a transformed RandomField IsingModel of humandecisionmaking to changes in humanmemory and rationality parameters. Results presented communicate that convergence in the splitting of households between vaccinating or not is achieved for combinations ofmemory and rationality. The interaction of these cognition parameters with public information and social networks of opinions is detailed. This version of the PastoralScapemodel is intended to form the basis upon which richer economic and human factor models can be built.