Drylands cover 40% of the world's surface and provide the basis for the livelihoods of at least one billion people. Pastoralists in these regions face risk and uncertainty due to highly variable climatic conditions. Therefore, and due to global change, novel risk-coping management strategies have evolved in recent decades. For example, in many pastoral regions in drylands government supplementary feeding programs are commonly introduced as a strategy to address multiple societal challenges related to climate risks, such as poverty alleviation or the maintenance of resilient pastures, in a cost-efficient way. Therefore, it is crucial to assess government supplementation programs from a multi-criteria cost-benefit perspective.

Using a generic, ecological–economic simulation model we analyze the potential benefits and threats of supplementary feeding in the form of government subsidies. Our results show that currently practiced supplementary feeding strategies may cause damage in the long term because of unintended side-effects such as degradation and cost explosion. In addition, we present a novel risk-coping strategy that supports farmers and is also both ecologically and economically sustainable. Last but not least, it is shown that government supplementation programs are only cost-efficient if they are regionalized and adapted to the specific ecological characteristics of the rangeland utilization systems in question.