When he thinks of last winter, Ganzorig Tserenchimed grimaces. Icy winds whipped across the steppe and a thick crust of frost hardened over the ground, preventing animals from getting to what little grass there was beneath. Temperatures plunged below -35C.
Weakened by hunger, dozens of his livestock froze to death. Others suffocated in their pens as they desperately pressed together for warmth. To save the rest, Ganzorig travelled hundreds of miles to find pasture, spending several weeks sleeping in his car. The experience almost broke his resolve.
“This nomadic lifestyle is our heritage, I’m proud to be continuing it,” says Ganzorig, as he passes around a bowl of fermented mares’ milk at his ger, a traditional Mongolian circular felt tent. “But it’s becoming very difficult because of the extreme weather. I’m nearly 50 and sometimes I think: ‘What is the point of herding through these difficult times?’ I could just sell up and find a job in the city.”
Some 30% of Mongolia’s almost 3.5 million people work as herders, following the seasons across the steppe in search of fresh pasture for their animals. Even city dwellers take pride in their country’s association with pastoralism.
“We are tied to livestock,” says Byambadorj Sainjargal, an official from Ganzorig’s central province of Uvurkhangai. “The nomadic culture is in our genes.”
Yet climate breakdown and bad management are destroying Mongolia’s grasslands, 90% of which are affected by desertification. Hundreds of thousands of herders have abandoned their flocks and surrendered to the pull of the city.
Temperatures in landlocked Mongolia have risen by 2.2C since 1940, far above the global average increase, while annual rainfall has fallen steeply, according to the UN. The shift has brought drier summers, followed by punishingly cold winters – a weather phenomenon unique to Mongolia and known locally as dzud.
Not long ago, dzuds were declared once or twice a decade. “Nowadays it is almost yearly,” says Granzorig, as he lists recent hard winters: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.
Less rain in summer means less grass on the steppe, making it difficult for the animals to fatten up for winter. When the rain does come, it can fall heavily and quickly, washing away topsoil. Hail storms, dust storms and other extreme weather events are also becoming more frequent.
“Climate change is happening now,” says Bayan-Altai Luvsandorj, country head of Save the Children, which provides emergency help to herders. “Unless policymakers take immediate action, this nomadic way of life will die out and the country will be left without an identity.”
The effects are visible on the gently rolling plain where Ganzorig has pitched his ger: the sparse tufts of grass sprouting out of the sandy soil are short, dry and brittle. A couple of miles away, as her grandchildren herd her family’s goats into a pen for the night, Ganzorig’s neighbour Jamb Navgan recalls how different life was in her youth.
“When I was a girl, my parents couldn’t find me in the grass, it was that tall,” the 68-year-old says. “We had many wildflowers and a lot of rain in the summer, but in the past 10 years we’ve had barely any grass at all.”
Like many herders, Jamb’s family have taken on debts to buy fodder. Last winter’s loan brought the total to 13m Mongolian tugriks, about £3,000. The family had hoped to pay it off by selling lambs and kids in the spring, but few of their malnourished animals reproduced. Now they are discussing taking out a new loan to pay off the old one. “It’s like a loop,” says Jamb. “What we produce is never enough to pay off the debts.”
Having watched the hardships endured by their parents, few young Mongolians want to follow in their footsteps. At the secondary school in Sant, a nearby town, the pupils want to be teachers, police officers and doctors, not herders. “With the severe weather, it is too hard,” says 15-year-old Shirnentuya Enkhtur.
Yet climate breakdown is not the only problem. Overgrazing also presents a huge challenge, one with its roots in the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Under communist rule, livestock was managed by the state. Herders could own a small number of animals, but government associations reared most livestock. This changed when the iron curtain fell. Limits on private property were lifted. So too were livestock taxes and laws regulating pasture land.
So the size of the national herd soared: having historically hovered around 20 million, the number more than tripled to 71 million by 2022. Desertification means this larger number of animals is grazing on less land.
Meanwhile, the global price of cashmere shot up, driven by demand from China’s growing middle class. This sent Mongolia’s herders rushing to buy more goats. With their habit of eating roots and seeds, goats are more damaging to grasslands than sheep and cattle.
Mongolian herders have become dependent on their cashmere. Jamb estimates that 80% of her family’s income derives from the wool and says their financial situation would improve if only they could buy more goats. “In this area, there is no other option,” she says, “There is no market for meat.”
Making things worse is the advent of huge herds, often owned as investments by affluent urbanites and entrepreneurs. About 80% of herders own less than 500 livestock and their animals make up 45% of the national herd. The remaining 55% of Mongolia’s livestock is owned by the wealthiest 20% of herders, according to government data.
“From my perspective, the government is not doing enough,” says Nyamtaivan Odongerel, director of Steppe and Hoof, a herder advocacy group. “We can’t control the weather, but we can introduce policies to deal with the impact of climate change.”
Crucially, Mongolia lacks legislation on grazing lands management. Several bills have been drafted; the latest is due to be discussed in parliament soon. Regulation would be deeply unpopular with herders, whose votes rural MPs are fearful of losing, which stifles decision-making.
“It is a big issue for parliamentarians,” says Burmaa Dashbal, head of the National Federation of Pasture User Groups (NFPUG). “Herders have a strong voice and when they speak as a group, no one can beat them.”
Currently, Mongolia’s herders can take their livestock anywhere. The new legislation would change that by giving herders rights over their local pastures and the ability to stop outsiders from grazing them. In theory, the herders would then have the ability to rotate their pasture throughout the year, giving it time to recover.
Both Steppe and Hoof and NFPUG are encouraging the use of artificial semination and modern veterinary practices to increase the value of individual animals, allowing herders to reduce herd size without losing income, says Burmaa.
“They all recognise land degradation is an issue and something needs to be done, but they cannot agree what,” she adds.
In the meantime, huge numbers of people are migrating to the capital, Ulaanbaatar, a traffic-clogged sprawl of crumbling Soviet buildings, apartment blocks and smoking power stations. Most have set up their tents in “ger districts”, a series of hard-scrabble neighbourhoods on the city’s fringes lacking sanitation or services.
To keep warm, their residents burn coal. The fumes get trapped by the mountains surrounding Ulaanbataar and turn into dense smog that makes the city one of the world’s most polluted capitals.
“Inequality is increasing because you have established urban families in the city and then you have the migrants flooding in from the countryside, trying to make a living,” says Bayan-Altai. “They have little access to basic services and are often exploited by employers.”
Bartbaatar Ulzibat made the move in 2010. That year a particularly devastating dzud wiped out 8 million animals across Mongolia and triggered one of the biggest waves of migration to Ulaanbaatar in recent memory. “We had 40 horses, 40 cows and about 350 goats and sheep,” says Bartbaatar, 43. “Then suddenly the dzud came and took it all away.”
In Ulaanbaatar, Bartbaatar has worked as a guard, a labourer and a forklift driver. His ger is pitched beneath two pylons. It is new, provided by Save the Children, after flooding washed away his old one in August.
“The pollution is the worst part, especially in the winter,” he says. “At night, I feel a sharp pain in my lungs and whenever I spit, the colour is black.”
Like so many others, Barbaatar had planned to stay in the city a short while, just long enough to make some money and start again, but he never managed to save up. Now he has to stay close to his children’s schools.
He clings to a faint dream of one day returning to the fresh air and open country of the steppe, but he does not know how. “Where I used to live, there are few herders left,” he says. “Everyone is moving to the city.”
