Mongolia to join Earth Hour under theme of reducing plastic use

ULAN BATOR, March 27 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia will again participate in this year's Earth Hour campaign under the theme of reducing plastic use, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Mongolia said Wednesday.

"Plastic waste is one of the most pressing environmental concerns facing the world. So, the country will join the upcoming annual campaign with activities raising public awareness on consequences of plastic waste," Nyamsuren Enkhbayar, spokesperson of the WWF-Mongolia, told Xinhua.

Earth Hour is a worldwide movement organized by the WWF since 2007 and will see millions of people across the world switching off their lights for one hour, from 8:30 to 9:30 pm on a specific day towards the end of March to help fight climate change.

Earth Hour 2019 is scheduled for March 30, and Mongolia has participated in the annual campaign since the year of 2010.

Buildings surrounding central squares of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator and several provinces such as Khovd, Uvs, Bayan-Ulgii, Dornod and Khentii will be in darkness for an hour, Enkhbayar said, urging people to switch off their lights too.

The Asian country has been focusing on reducing plastic use in recent years. It has announced to ban the use, sale, import and production of single-use plastic bags thinner than 0.035 mm across the country, which came into force on March 1.

It is estimated that more than 2 million tons of waste, including 500,000 tons of plastic waste, are produced in the country each year.

Out of the plastic waste, just less than 10 percent is recycled, according to the Mongolian Ministry of Environment and Tourism.

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Mongolia to establish independent agency for water management: PM

ULAN BATOR, March 25 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia is working to establish an independent agency for water management, the country's Prime Minister Ukhnaa Khurelsukh said Monday.

He made the statement during a meeting with water experts of the country, according to the government's press office.

"I have fully supported a proposal by water experts on establishing an agency which is in charge of the issues of the country's water," Khurelsukh said, adding that he has ordered relevant ministers to conduct research.

Mongolians' water consumption now lies at between 7 and 160 liters per day depending on where they live, which means that, compared with other countries, Mongolia ranks in the middle of the list of countries in the world by per capita water consumption, adequacy and hygiene of drinking water, N. Enkhbayar, an advisor to Khurelsukh, said on Thursday.

The Asian country boasts some 11,902 cubic meters of renewable internal freshwater resources per capita, according to data released by the World Bank in 2014.

Though the amount of water resources per capita in Mongolia looks abundant, the resources are unevenly distributed, with most rivers and lakes located in the northern mountainous regions of the landlocked country, while in other parts of the country, especially southern desert areas, underground sources account for 80 percent of total water consumption.

Around 30 percent of Mongolia's population has access to the water supply system. About 25 percent of the population receives water from the water transportation service, over 35 percent gets water from water supply points and less than 10 percent uses water from springs, rivers and snow water.

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A Step Forward for Conservation in Mongolia?

Balanced between the Russian and Chinese superpowers, both of which are mineral- and energy- hungry, Mongolia is rich in resources. Three million people share a landmass one-sixth the size of the United States. Because of the sparseness of the population, several of its ecosystems are complex enough to host rare and endangered large mammal species. Wild camels, for example — distinct from their domesticated cousins used for transport and food — shyly evade human contact in southern Mongolia. An aboriginal herding tradition is surviving even as it changes. Even though dirt bikes (rather than horses) are often used for herding, for example, traditional grazing and hunting routes are still used because the land is not parceled into private property.

Even domesticated animals roam wide swaths of land. Uninterrupted by the fences and barbed wire that are so ubiquitous in the US West that we hardly notice them anymore, the Mongolian steppe stretches the imaginations of outsiders.

The contest over land use in Mongolia will have major impact on species survival, as well as geopolitical importance for the Chinese and Russian economies. This November and December, the Mongolian parliament is discussing whether to almost double the size of the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area, from around 900,000 hectares more than 1,500,000. In Western Mongolia, the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area is the only protected area of the Dzungarian Gobi. This summer, we traveled to the Gobi protected areas with Ganbaatar Oyunsaikhan, chief administrator for the Great Gobi B, and G. Dovchindorj, a biologist and conservationist who works to protect the wild Bactrian camel.

In Great Gobi B, shin-high scrub and stipa grass transition into desert macadam. Springs become small rivers, die on the surface, and emerge as oasis grass and tamarisk arroyo bottoms. Wild takhi horses native to the Mongolian steppe, previously held in captivity in European zoos, have been reintroduced through collaboration between Mongolian officials and international conservation groups, like the Prague Zoo and the International Takhi Group. These species join wild ass, gazelle, ibex, wolf, snow leopard and mountain sheep in the area.

Oyunsaikhan wanted to show us every inch of the area that he is charged with protecting in southwestern Mongolia. He is a fierce conservationist. About eight years ago, he realized that the park wasn’t big enough to provide a safe habitat for all its animals. “We had an especially hard winter in 2009-2010,” Oyunsaikhan said. “During harsh winters and droughts, the wild ass in Great Gobi B needed to extend their range in order to survive. They left the park in search of sufficient food, and because of this, became vulnerable to poachers.” He and others began to lobby for an expansion of the park.

In addition to land, mineral deposits of gold, copper and coal are abundant in Mongolia. Chinese, Russian, US and Canadian companies are developing extensive extractive sites, sometimes in joint ventures with the Mongolian government. The Mongolian mining minister doubled the amount of land available for exploration and extraction in 2017 to 20 percent of Mongolia’s overall land base. This may accelerate coal extraction, because Mongolia sits atop the 15th largest coal reserves in the world.

In the South, huge coal mines feed Chinese industries through veins of transport along hurriedly constructed roads teeming with exhaust-belting mega-trucks. Copper, gold and coal together comprise the lion’s share of Mongolian exports and about a third of its gross domestic product. Domestic energy is dominated by coal-burning stoves, making Ulaanbaatar one of the most polluted capital cities in the world.

Unlike the Umnugobi province, where the Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area is located, Khovd province, home to Great Gobi B, is not mined for gold, copper or coal. While this may be beneficial to the ecosystem, there is a catch: There are fewer resources available for conservation. Mining interests are mandated to fund “conservation offset” projects, but these funds are controlled by the provincial authorities, not the central government. Therefore, the localities with the most success in conservation funds are those that allow extensive mining. “In Great Gobi B, we have no mining and far fewer tourists,” said Oyunsaikhan. “Which unfortunately means far fewer dollars for conservation.”

In addition to the conservation offsets required of mining corporations, Western nonprofits have jumped into the conservation game in Mongolia since the retreat of the Soviet empire. Groups like The Nature Conservancy have funded efforts to try to prevent species extinction, especially of some of Mongolia’s amazing and rare large mammal species, like the snow leopard. As Oyunsaikhan pointed out, such conservation dollars are often tied to areas that attract tourists. The Nature Conservancy has also, though, jumped into the “mining mitigation” game, advising the Mongolian government on how to use conservation offsets through its “Mitigation Design Tool,” which implies that there is a win-win strategy that can encompass both mining development and conservation.

The problem is that conservation offsets do not actually undo the harm that mines have done. There has been scant attention paid to mining reclamation in Mongolia, and little effort to demand cleanup or reparations from any of the damage done by extraction industries in the decades of Soviet control. A small group of Mongolian and Russian scientists has teamed up with the Southwest Research and Information Center, a small New Mexico-based think tank that focuses on repairing the damage done by mining. This team has focused on proposing a reclamation plan for the Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mine 200 kilometers East of the provincial capital Dalanzadgad.

If conservation efforts are going to succeed in the future, the Mongolian government will have to figure out how to solve the paradox rooted in the fact that provinces have an incentive to authorize further extractive development. Conservation offsets required of mining companies are the most lucrative source of money to help preserve and restore the complexity of the multitude of ecosystems across the vast country. At the same time, Mongolian sovereignty on this issue is compromised by the fact that large nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and international donors can set the agenda for preservation through their programs and deep pockets, unless there are strong and independent directives coming from inside Mongolia.

Mongolians trace their conservationism back to the Ikh Zasag legal code of Genghis Khan eight centuries ago. Environmental safeguards, like protection of air and water, were integrated into the overall systems of laws — unlike in Western constitutions centuries later, when environmental regulations were added as an afterthought, in many cases, decades or centuries after the original legal frameworks were written. In Chinggis Khaan’s Mongolia, clean air and water and protected sacred sites were not seen as separate from laws governing the conduct of people.

Conservationist impulses in governance continued thereafter; Mongolia established the world’s first national park in the late 18th century, for example, while the bourgeois democracy concurrently being born in France would not be as visionary on the need for the protection of land for well over a century. Mongolia would not be integrated into the global industrial economic system that treats land and resources as disposable until becoming a satellite state of the Soviet Union in 1921.

Great Gobi B, a Strictly Protected Area, continues to have stringent restrictions on development. The Ministry of the Environment and Tourism administers the protected areas — an illustration of how closely conservation efforts have become tied to tourism and the funding of international environmental NGOs. National conservation parks, nature reserves and monuments offer somewhat less protection than Strictly Protected Areas. As the world’s appetite for Mongolia’s mineral resources becomes more insatiable, environmental protection practices could  become a key issue of national sovereignty for the Mongolian state, which spent much of the last century under the control of the Chinese empire or as a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

The parliamentary vote on expanding the Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area will be an important view of what it is to come.

By Michael Berman

Source:https://truthout.org/articles/a-step-forward-for-conservation-in-mongolia/

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Climate change brings "significant risks" to Mongolia: PM

ULAN BATOR, Oct. 6 (Xinhua) -- Climate change brings significant risks to Mongolia, said Mongolian Prime Minister Ukhnaa Khurelsukh on Friday when speaking at the parliament on the issues of population resettlement and urban development in the country.
"The situation of rural-to-urban migration in Mongolia has been intensifying due to climate-related natural disasters," he said, and the consequent problems of rapid urbanization pose "significant risks to our country, especially the capital of Ulan Bator."
"Particularly, the air and soil pollution in the capital of Ulan Bator is expected to worsen. So, we need to pay more attention to improving living conditions and increasing employment in other cities and rural areas in order to mitigate the overconcentration of population in the capital region," he said.
The average temperature now in Mongolia is up 2.10 degrees Celsius from 1940, more than doubling the rise in average global temperature, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
The climate change is increasing the risk of natural disasters, including droughts and the extreme winter weather known as "dzud" in Mongolia.
Nearly 600,000 herders who lost their livestock during the dzuds have migrated to Ulan Bator over the past three decades, showed official data.
Mongolia has a population of 3.2 million, of which 66 percent live in urban areas, Khurelsukh said.
As of the end of 2017, Ulan Bator hosted 46 percent of Mongolia's population.

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