Gereltuya Bayanmukh speaks about her motivations to become involved in climate activism. Credit:  Leo Galuh/IPS

By Aatreyee Dhar
ULAANBAATAR, Jul 9 2025 (IPS)

Youth activist Gereltuya Bayanmukh still reflects on the events in her formative years that inspired her to become a climate activist. When she was a child, she would visit her grandparents in a village 20 km to the south of the border between Russia and Mongolia.

She was happy to see each of the nomadic people in their traditional gers power up their settlements using solar power.

“I remember seeing my neighbors own a solar panel and a battery to accumulate power. They were turning on lights and watching TV using solar power. Nowadays, they even have fridges,” she says.

She thought the herders made a conscious choice about their lifestyles and understood the need of the hour in the face of the looming climate crisis. That is to say, switch to renewable energy and power a safer future.

“This was the reason I became a climate activist,” she says.

No matter how unwitting her notion about her community achieving self-sufficiency with renewable energy was, the findings about what entailed this system revealed something else.

“I later learned that the solar panels were partially subsidized by the government as a part of the nationwide government to equip 100,000 nomadic households with solar energy,” she says.

What she perceived turned out to be a nationwide renewable energy scheme by the Mongolian government for the nomadic herders.

The scheme, called the National 100,000 Solar Ger [Yurt] Electricity Program, introduced in 2000, provided herders with portable photovoltaic solar home systems that complement their traditional nomadic lifestyle.

At least 30 percent of Mongolia’s population comprises nomadic herders. Before 2000, when the scheme came into effect, herders had limited or no access to modern electricity. By 2005, the government managed to equip over 30,000 herder families through funds from several donor nations.

However, the full-scale electrification effort for herders was beginning to stagnate. The 2006 midterm custom audit performance report by the Standing Committee on Environment, Food and Agriculture of the Parliament carried sobering revelations.

The scheme in its initial phase was poorly managed: there was no control over the distribution process, with some units delivered to local areas landing in the hands of non-residents violating the contract, failure to deliver the targeted number of generators, misappropriation of the program funds, and inability to repay the loans within the contractual period.

However, in the third phase–2006-2012–the program was able to expand its implementation with the support of several international donors, including the World Bank.

“At first, I thought how great that we started out with the renewable energy transition, giving access to renewable energy at a lower price. And it was even in 1999. That was when I was just four years old. I believe we were on our way to building a future like this. Like we visualized here. The future of green nomadism. However, my optimism faded when I read the midterm audit report and discovered that the program had been (just as) poorly managed as the first part. It was only with the assistance of the international partners that the program finished well,” says Gereltuya.

Gereltuya is the co-founder and board director of her NGO, Green Dot Climate, which focuses on empowering youth as climate activists and raising awareness and practical skills for climate action.

One of the mottoes of her NGO is to change the youth’s and Mongolian people’s attitudes and practices around climate change issues as well as solutions.

In the past year, the NGO has been successful in reaching over half a million Mongolians, including nomads, helping them become more environmentally conscious and empowering the youth to be climate activists—makers and doers themselves.

“In the past year, we have reached over half a million Mongolians. Our Green Dot youth community has logged more than 100,000 individual climate actions, saving over 700,000 kg of CO₂, 25 liters of water, and 80,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. Next, we will aim for a million collective actions, a stronger community and a minimum of 50 collaborative climate projects in Mongolia,” Gereltuya said during her delegate speech at the One Young World Summit, a global event that brings in young leaders from around the world to discuss global issues, in 2023.

The state of Mongolia’s nomads in the current energy system

Mongolia as a country heavily relies on coal for energy production, which contributes to 90 percent of its energy production. Coming to just transition, the government aims for a 30 percent renewable energy share by 2030 of its installed capacity, as enshrined in the State Policy on Energy 2015-2030. Mongolia is also committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 22.7 percent by 2030 while the energy sector accounts for 44.78 percent of the total emissions as of 2020 according to Mongolia’s Second Biennial Update Report.

Gereltuya’s NGO, Green Dot Climate, has been mapping Mongolia’s energy systems for the past few years now. As of 2024, Mongolia’s electricity sector relies on CHP [combined heat and power] plants and imports from Russia and China to meet its electricity demands.

Only 7 percent of its total installed energy comes from renewable sources, with the Central Energy System accounting for over 80 percent of the total electricity demand. “We found that about 200,000 households remain unaccounted for in the centralized energy grid calculations. These are likely the same nomadic families or their later generations who likely adopted their first solar systems at least two decades ago,” she explains.

Gereltuya says that her organisation meticulously compared the recent household data cited by the Energy Regulatory Commission of Mongolia to that of the total  number of households as per the Mongolian Statistical Information Service to find the numbers that went missing

Mongolia’s backslide into fossil-fuel economy

Although Mongolia has promised to increase its renewable energy share to 30 percent by 2030, it is still far behind in the race to achieve its target.

In the 2020 Nationally Determined Contribution [NDC] submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], Mongolia set its mitigation target to “a 22.7% reduction in total national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030,” which can increase to a 27.2 percent reduction if conditional mitigation measures such as carbon capture and storage and waste-to-energy technology are implemented. Further, if “actions and measures to remove GHG emissions by forest are determined”, the total mitigation target would rise to 49.9 percent by 2030.

“Instead of focusing on decarbonizing its coal-based economy, Mongolia shifted to focus on carbon-sink and sequestration processes to reduce its emissions. This suggests that despite our many promises, policies and past efforts to mainstream renewables, we may still end up with business as usual. A case of bad governance, stagnation and vicious cycles,” she says.

Recommendations for Mongolia’s energy sector

Gereltuya’s NGO has been actively engaged in the survey ‘Earth Month 2025’ that is aimed at collecting specific recommendations from the youth voices in the country for the NDC 3.0 that the government is expected to submit in COP30. She shares a few recommendations that she believes can help improve the country’s energy systems.

On the demand side, households not connected to the grid should update and improve their solar home systems, especially now that the solutions are much cheaper and more efficient.

According to the 2024 World Bank ‘Mongolia Country Climate and Development Report,’ the average residential tariff for electricity in Mongolia was estimated to be 40 percent below cost recovery, and subsidies were worth 3.5 percent of GDP in 2022. The lack of cost recovery created hurdles in efforts to enhance energy efficiency and investment in renewable energy. In the context, those connected to the grid should pay more for their energy use to reflect the real cost of energy production and support renewable energy feed-in tariffs. There should be responsible voting of citizens demanding better policies and implementations and not trading in policies for short-term gains.

On the supply side, there is a need to stop new fossil fuel projects immediately: there are at least six such projects, including one international project under Mongolia’s current Energy Revival Policy, underway.

Secondly, Mongolia’s electricity infrastructure needs significant improvement. As the UNDP recently highlighted, Mongolia’s infrastructure is aging, inefficient and heavily subsidized.

Thirdly, fully utilize installed energy capacity, which is at only 30 percent, largely owing to the infrastructure inefficiency.

Fourth is to increase the overall renewable energy capacity five times to meet demand, which means 15 times the energy made in full demand. And phase out coal-based power, replacing it with fully renewable energy.

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A woman stands outside a yurt in Ger District, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There is power plant nearby but the government says it aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Courtesy: CC BY-SA 4.0/Nathalie Daoust

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Jan 26 2021 (IPS)

Climate warming is believed to have taken place at some of the fastest rates in the world in Mongolia, raising the country’s average temperatures by 2.24°C between 1940 and 2015, with the last decade being the warmest of the past 76 years.

In the Gobi Desert, the occurrence of dust storms increased from 18 to 57 days between 1960 to 2007, and in 2000 almost half a million people were affected by drought. The north-eastern Asian country’s northern region is expected to become more arid over this century as annual precipitation decreased by 7 percent over the past 76 year despite an increase in winter rains. In addition to the drying landscape, changes in water availability is a serious, growing concern.

“Around 90 percent of the annual precipitation is now lost to evapotranspiration. Livestock feed is increasingly falling short (in the steppes),” Dr. Batjargal Zamba, Mongolia’s National United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) focal point, told IPS via Skype from Ulaanbaatar.

Traditional livelihoods bear the brunt of changing climate

Between 1999 and 2002, and again between 2009 and 2010, Mongolia was hit by a series of extremely harsh winters or dzuds that resulted in the death of around 10 million of an estimated 44 million livestock population. The extreme cold and coating of icy snow can prevent animals from getting to their pasture and causes mass deaths. Nearly 70 percent rangeland pastures are degraded, according to the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

This is a major push factor for the huge migration of traditional herders of camels, yaks, goats, and sheep into Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city on the banks of the Tuul River in the north-central portion of the country. Urban availability of better health, education and market facilities add to the rural migration.

Nearly half of Mongolia’s 3.2 million people reside in its capital, and the city is facing uncontrollable air pollution, making climate impacts worse. Ulaanbaatar, like other Mongolian cities, has air pollution concentrations — mostly from coal burning to heat homes  — almost six times higher than the recommended World Health Organisation (WHO) air quality guidelines.

In traditionally dry Mongolia, flash floods have become a new feature. As warmer air has a higher capacity to carry moisture in the form of water vapour, global warming is already causing extreme rainfall events. In summer, Mongolia’s 2.24°C higher temperature is melting the snow faster, thawing the permafrost, so much so that it is not just the vast Gobi Desert in the south which is affected, but devastating flash floods have reached Ulaanbaatar, destroying roads and houses on its way, according to Zamba. 

These natural hazards occurring from shifts in climate dynamics frequently affect Mongolia with high loss and damage to agriculture and livestock sectors, hampering poverty reduction efforts, causing economic shock, and contributing to unsustainable rural to urban migration. With a per capita income of $4,295, Mongolia was ranked 106th globally, according to the World Bank.

Mongolia steps up climate control with international partnerships

According to Mongolia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism, the government has been undertaking a number of measures, which include:

• National Climate Change Programme (2011),
• Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (2015),
• Green Development Policy (2015), 
• Sustainable Development Vision 2030 (2016), and
• the newly-approved Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).

The central element for implementing the Paris Agreement are the NDCs of each of the 196 Parties to the climate convention. NDCs are national climate plans highlighting climate actions, related targets, policies and measures governments aims to implement in response to climate change and as a contribution to global climate action.

Mongolia is engaged closely with international efforts to mitigate climate change and its impacts. It is one of the 63 countries that is being supported by the Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), an initiative of the NDC Partnership (NDCP) with financial and technical assistance not only to submit enhanced NDCs but to also fast-track their implementation.

Mongolia’s NDCs, outlining and communicating their government’s post-2020 climate actions, was approved in November 2019. In it, Mongolia intends to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 22.7 percent by 2030, compared to the business-as-usual scenario. This goal excludes land use, land-use change, and forestry (LULUCF). To reduce emissions, it will focus on the energy sector, namely energy production, energy consumption and transmission loss. In the non-energy sector it will focus on agriculture, industry, and waste-to-energy.

Adaptation in the livelihoods sector, especially in nature-based solutions to water conservation, is also highlighted in the NDCs.

“In addition, if mitigation measures such as carbon capture and sequestration; waste-to-energy, technologies, which are few with developing nations are implemented under international financial mechanism and technical support, Mongolia could achieve a 27.2 percent reduction in total national GHG emissions,” Zamba told IPS.

“This would include capture of methane gas from coal mining, waste-to-energy conversion particularly utilising Ulaanbaatar city’s massive waste dumps. Additionally, greening the steppe region, which covers more than three-fourths of the national territory, increasing forest cover would build up a substantial carbon sink [to increase] carbon removal and reduction in total, to as high as 40.9 percent,” asserted Zamba. Siberian larches and cedars, spruces, pines, and firs with deciduous trees birches, aspens, and poplars cover Mongolia’s northern mountain slopes.

After Mongolia’s new national government came to power in June 2020, the drive to mitigate climate change has been increased via an inter-sectoral integrated climate action plan involving as many as nine ministries. 

The CAEP has also helped on various fronts, making Mongolia’s climate actions more robust and inter-sectoral. Under the CAEP, the Mongolian government has partnered with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), among other institutions over the course of 2020 and 2021, according to ministry sources.

“The CAEP has facilitated to integrate NDC implementation into our national action plans and strategies. Mongolia aspires to reach net-zero emission by 2050,” Zamba said.

Enkhbat Altangerel, Director-General of Mongolia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism, told IPS via email: “Mongolia has joined the NDC Partnership in 2017 and since has been an active member. A number of significant achievements were attained within the frame of the cooperation, such as a partnership plan which was developed and approved, NDC Partners’ online and coordination platform was established. This was a pioneering measure in the field and currently the platform functions as the main NDC coordination and tracking mechanism at the national level.” 

Private sector engagement is essential and prioritised in the implementation of climate policies said Altangerel. Already two private sector commercial banks, XacBank and the Trade and Development Bank, are designated as Accredited Entities for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and are able to disburse GCF-provided green loans to large solar projects. The government has also proposed a Mongolian Green Finance Corporation in cooperation with GCF, which will become the main national green financing body.

Implementing the 2019 NDC till 2030, inclusive of mitigation and adaptation plans, is calculated to cost $11.5 billion, Zamba told IPS.

A yurt in Mongolia with a solar panel that provides electricity and also connects the satellite tv. Courtesy: CC By 2.0/Niek van Son

Speeding towards renewable energy in the Land of Eternal Blue Sky

With between 220 and 260 clear, sunny days each year, Mongolia is called the Land of the Eternal Blue Sky. The country’s combined wind and solar power potential is estimated by the ADB to be equivalent of 2,600 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity or 5,457 terawatt-hours of clean electricity generation per year. The amount is enough to meet the country’s energy demand of around 1.2GW as of 2018 and allow it to still export the remaining, yet currently Mongolia’s coal-dependent energy sector emits two-thirds of its GHG. Coal being cheap and plentiful, coal-fired thermal power plants accounted for a total of 96.1 percent of the total electricity supply in 2015.

But that’s about to change.

“The most emitting sectors are energy and agriculture,” admits Altangerel, “but renewable energy is where our key mitigation achievements are, so far.”

From a current renewable mix of 20 percent share in total electricity generation dominated by wind and solar, with hydro and geothermal, it is targeting a total 1,356 MW or triple the current installed capacity by 2030.

To reduce dirty power generation, Mongolia will also install its first large-scale advanced battery energy storage system in partnership with ADB, facilitated by CAEP. Renewable is also set to provide urban heating in Mongolia’s bitter winter where coal, wood and even rubber tyres are used by the urban poor.

Facilitating private sector partnerships

The private sector engagement is essential in implementation of climate actions said Altangerel.

“We are not asking the private sector to help; we are coercing them. With incentives of course!” Zamba half-jokingly adds. In developing economies public-private partnerships (PPP) are essential, with governments being resource constrained.

The government has prioritised cooperation with the private sector in implementing the NDCs and relevant policies.

After XacBank, one of Mongolia’s large commercial financial institutions in 2019 became the first private sector Accredited Entity for GCF, the bank disburses GCF-provided green loans to large solar projects. The Trade and Development Bank is the second bank to be designated Accredited Entity for GCF. Mongolia has also proposed a Mongolian Green Finance Corporation in cooperation with GCF which will become the main green financing national body.

“Considering the efficiency and rapid process of the CAEP programme, our government is further planning to extend its collaboration with NDC Partnership at sectoral level for the implementation of sector-specific NDC targets and activities,” Altangerel told IPS.

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January 2018 alone saw temperatures drop to -50 degrees Celsius. This has had vast impacts on Mongolia’s herders. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage and IPS Correspondent
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2019 (IPS)

The landlocked country of Mongolia sparks certain images in the mind—rolling hills with horses against a picturesque backdrop.

However, the East Asian country is facing a threat that will change its landscape: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t affecting everyone around the world evenly. Small island states is an example and another example is people who live in more norther climates like Mongolia,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment John Knox told IPS.

“The problem for Mongolia is, with respect to climate change, is that it contributes almost nothing to greenhouse gasses…so that means instead Mongolia has to be concerned with adaptation,” he added.

According to the Mongolian Ministry of Environment, the mean air temperature increase by more than 2 degrees Celsius between 1940 and 2014, more than twice the global average.

This has increased the frequency of natural disasters such as what is locally known as “dzud”—a summer drought followed by a severe winter, a phenomenon that has increased over recent years.

January 2018 alone saw temperatures drop to -50 degrees Celsius.

This has had vast impacts on the country’s herders.

Almost 50 percent of the Mongolia’s 3 million population are employed in animal husbandry. They produce 35 percent of agricultural gross production and account for 30 percent of the country’s export.

At the same time, 28 percent of the population live at or below the poverty line, making them dependent on this trade.

Almost 50 percent of the Mongolia’s 3 million population are employed in animal husbandry. They produce 35 percent of agricultural gross production and account for 30 percent of the country’s export. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

“Any adverse impact of a changing climate on pasture availability would threaten forage yield, livestock productivity, and, ultimately, local and national food production capacity. Hence, environment and climate condition play a key role in the sustainable development of the country,” said Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI)’s Mongolia representative Romain Brillie.

Approximately 70 percent of grassland in the country is impacted by desertification while the area of barren land expanded 3 times between 1992 and 2006.

While overgrazing has contributed to the changes in the environment, climate change has exacerbated the impacts.

Without sustainable livelihoods, many have poured into the country’s cities including Ulaanbaatar where they live in informal settlements without basic facilities such as running water or sanitation.

And to cope with the long and harsh winters, families use coal-fired stoves, contributing to air pollution.

In fact, Ulaanbaatar has one of the highest rates of air pollution in the world, increasing the risk of acute and chronic respiratory issues.

According to U.N.’s Children Agency (UNICEF), the three diseases that have resulted in the most lost life-years in the East Asian countries are related to air pollution.

But steps are being taken to mitigate the crisis, Brillie noted.

“Mongolia has been very active in establishing a conducive policy environment for climate change mitigation and adaptation…for instance, Mongolia is one of the countries that has been the most successful in accessing the Green Climate Fund,” he told IPS.

In 2017, the government adopted a new law which aims to increase the country’s share of renewable energy in total primary energy sources to 25 percent by 2025, and 30 percent by 2030.

Mongolia has already started investing in wind power, establishing its first wind farm in 2013.

GGGI has also been working with the government to support its green development targets in energy and green finance.

In 2018, GGGI helped secure 10 million dollars from the Government of Mongolia and Mongolian commercial banks to invest into the Mongolia Green Finance Corporation, a vehicle to leverage investments by the financial sector.

Knox highlighted the importance of such civil society in efforts towards climate change mitigation and adaptation.

“I think it’s at the individual and community level that we really see sustainable development take hold,” he said.

Brillie also pointed to the much needed role of the private sector, stating: “Financing Mongolia’s NDC’s alone would require 6,9 billion dollars and public investment alone cannot match the extent of the challenge…policy, regulatory and financial incentives and guarantees need to come together to help private companies invest into green projects.”

While there are now standards in place, Knox noted the need to implement and enforce them including in efforts to cut back on coal energy.

Currently, only seven precent of Mongolia’s energy production is renewable energy, and they will have to ramp up action if they are to reach their 2030 target.

And the Paris Agreement should be the light forward.

“In many ways, the threat of climate change in Mongolia can only be addressed by collective action by the major emitters of the world…The parties to the Paris Agreement need to surmount up their commitments as quickly as possible and they need to take more effective actions to implement the commitments they have already undertaken,” Knox told IPS.

Brillie spotlighted the role youth can and will play in the country’s sustainable, green future as GGGI works with Mongolia’s Ministry of Environment to promote green education.

“Young people are already driving change across the world. We must provide the skills to create new and green lifestyle,” he said.

Excerpt:

Frank Rijsberman.

By Stella Paul
ULAANBAATAR, Sep 14 2017 (IPS)

Rapid growth of a coal-fired economy often leads to environmental degradation, and Mongolia is a case in point.

Alongside an impressive 5.3 percent GDP growth rate, the country has also been witnessing its worst levels of air pollution and is now trying hard to shift to a greener economic model, said experts at the Mongolian Sustainable Finance Forum (MSFF) 2017 held Sep. 14 in the capital of Ulaanbaatar."A key achievement of the forum this year was setting up of a new credit system called the Mongolia Green Credit Fund." --Frank Rijsberman, Director General of GGGI

Speaking exclusively to IPS on the sidelines of the event, Frank Rijsberman, Director General of the Seoul-based Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI), which is a key partner of the forum, said the forum had just helped establish a Mongolia Green Climate Fund which would see a flow of funds for projects that would bring in more green economic growth through cleaner energy, cleaner transport and projects to make Mongolia’s cities more sustainable.

“In Mongolia, the economy has grown very rapidly. That has led to some serious environmental issues. For example, Mongolia has used a lot of coal-based energy. As a result, it now has the worst level of air pollution in the region. If (the pollution in) in New Delhi is bad and worse in Beijing, then it’s the worst in Ulaanbaatar. In fact the country had to declare a national emergency over the brown haze,” said Rijsberman.

The MSSF, which is now in its 5th year, has been working to address this key challenge of poor air quality, besides other environmental issues such as renewable energy and sustainable cities. This year, the forum focused on roping in more partners and increasing the involvement and contribution of current ones in funding the green projects within Mongolia.

There were over 350 participants including national policy makers, business leaders, private sector investors, bankers, government officials, representatives of civic groups and international organizations. They came from a wide array of fields, including green development, sustainable finance, and innovative technologies.

“A key achievement of the forum this year was setting up of a new credit system called the Mongolia Green Credit Fund,” noted Rijsberman.

Launched later this year, the new credit fund is expected to mobilize between 8-10 million dollars to finance energy efficient projects in Ulaanbaatar’s public buildings.

Highlighting his own organization’s involvement in the MSFF and the new credit system, Rijsberman said that GGGI was trying to help Mongolia develop “bankable projects” for the funders.

Mongolia is one of the largest coal-producing countries in the world. According to statistics shared by the Mongolia‘s Ministry of Energy, over 80 percent of the country’s energy is coal-fired. Statistics by other research organisations such as Index Mundi show the air pollution level, measured at 2.5 pm (particulate matter), is dangerously high, while the country’s annual carbon emissions are 14 metric tonnes.

However, the government has committed to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and the Paris Agreement by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 14 percent by 2030. Now, the country needs about seven billion dollars to finance its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) focusing on energy efficiency, renewable energy, buildings, waste and transportation. The banking sector – the main participant and organizer of the MSFF – has agreed to accelerate sustainable finance initiatives and a green economy transition.

“Apart from that (seven billion dollars), businesses and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need an additional investment of 1.5 trillion dollars in the coming five years mostly for construction and manufacturing sector projects. Additionally, tackling critical sustainability issues such as air and soil pollution requires financing equal to 4.3 billion dollars. To fill in this investment gap, all partners – public, private and international organizations – need to act together,” said Orkhon O., President of the Mongolian Bankers Association.

Rijsberman said GGGI has helped develop MGCF’s Business Plan and conduct market assessment to identify the most crucial areas that require investment to achieve the NDCs. These areas are 1) Cleaner Alternative Heating Solutions for the Ger Segment, 2) Energy Efficiency Products for Large Energy Consumers, and 3) Affordable Green Housing and Mortgage Schemes.

There will be more such assessments in the future, with a special focus on tackling air pollution in Ulaanbaatar .

Asked how the Mongolian Sustainable Finance Forum is different from other Green Growth forums as the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF ) of Denmark or the Indonesia Sustainable Finance Forum, Rijsberman said that the forum in Mongolia was organized mainly by a group of banks including the Bank of Mongolia, Credit Bank, Trade & Development Bank and several others. So, it is a forum where investment is a high priority besides fostering partnerships.

“We are especially focusing on energy and sustainable cities and working closely with city and national government partners to improve the regulatory and institutional frameworks needed to launch a green, inclusive Public-Private-Partnership investment program,” he explained.

Products made from collected garbage provide a new source of livelihood for many in the “gur districts” (urban outskirts) of Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Credit: Jonathan Rozen/IPS

By Jonathan Rozen
ULAANBAATAR, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

Ulziikhutag Jigjid, 49, is a member of a 10-person group in the Khan-Uul district on the outskirts of Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, which is producing brooms, chairs, containers, and other handmade products from discarded soda and juice containers.

“In the early morning we collect raw materials from the street, and then we spend the morning making products,” Jigjid told IPS. At four o’clock in the evening, she heads off to her regular job at a meat company.

The creation of her group’s business, and others like it, are part of an initiative called Turning Garbage Into Gold (TG2G), developed and supported by Tehnoj, an Ulaanbaatar-based non-governmental organisation.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day…This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages." -- Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia
Founded in 2007, this organisation supports the creation of small businesses based on the sale of handcrafted products.

Defining itself as a “business incubator centre” for small and medium-sized businesses, Tehnoj estimates that it has organised trainings for approximately 30,000 people across Mongolia, through various projects.

The TG2G project is currently operational in three of Ulaanbaatar’s outer districts: Khan-Uul, Chingeltei and Songino Khairkhan, and includes 20 production groups of around five to six people each.

“The goal of this project is to recycle products and reduce unemployment,” Galindev Galaariidii, director of Tehnoj, told IPS.

The NGO receives its funding from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP)’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific Innovation Fund, a new U.N. initiative to support innovative programmes that “provide the creative space and discretionary resources to prototype innovative solutions and experiment with new ways of working to tackle complex development challenges outside the traditional business cycle,” Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia, explained to IPS.

The Innovation Fund is currently supporting the creation of programmes in 32 countries and helps promote environmental sustainability and inclusive economic and social development, key components of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

Waste management and pollution are major problems in Mongolia, especially in the urban outskirts. With extremely limited infrastructure and a general lack of governmental resources, Galaariidii explains that 90 percent of garbage from these areas ends up on the street.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day… This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages,” said Eriksson.

According to UNDP, over 10,000 households move to Ulaanbaatar every year. “Unfortunately, the migrant population [find it difficult to gain employment] and obtain access to already strained social services,” Eriksson continued.

The TG2G programme aims to mitigate the waste management issues while also tackling social inequalities by empowering the less fortunate members of some of Mongolia’s poorest communities.

According to World Bank data for 2012-2013, Mongolia’s poverty rate stood at 27.4 percent of its population of 2.9 million people.

Finding jobs in the landlocked country, comprised of some 1.6 million square km, of which only 0.8 percent is arable land, is no easy task. While the mining sector has led rapid economic growth over the last decade, with growth touching 16 percent in the first quarter of 2012, not everyone has benefitted. In fact, the unemployment rate in 2012 was roughly 11 percent.

“We target Ulaanbaatar’s poorest areas with high unemployment,” Galaariidii explained to IPS. “We focus on two main groups: women [often mothers of disabled children], and the unemployed.”

The programme currently focuses on training groups in the creation of six main products: brooms, chairs, foot covers (often used for walking in temples or schools), picnic mats, waterproof ger (yurt) insulation sheets and containers of all sizes.

But new product designs are constantly being created. Oven mitts, bags, hats and aprons are just a few of the new forms of merchandise being developed.

“Our technology design is improving day by day,” said Galaariidii. For example, where zippers once secured the fabric covers of chairs, now elastic rings are used.

Presently, city cleaning teams are testing products with the potential for a government contract, and soda-bottle-broom orders are already coming in from hairdressers in Ulaanbaatar.

Communities involved in the TG2G programme seem to have a fresh sense optimism about the future.

Unrolling a large hand-drawn poster, Jigjid and two other group members – Baguraa Adiyabazar, 54, and Baasanjav Jamsranjav, 37 – explained how they plan to use the funds they earn from selling their products.

They want to build a kindergarten school, achieve full employment in their area, build a chicken farm, expand their ability to grow their own food and increase the availability of cars. There are even plans to allot a certain amount of the money towards a savings account, which can then be used to make small loans within the community.

“We plan to have more registration for the projects and more training programmes,” Jigjid explained. “[Eventually] we want to replace products that are imported from other countries.”

Beyond the material level, the programme is also having a positive impact on the mentality of the community.

“We have a mission to become more creative,” Jigjid continued. “Now as a group we have a goal.”

Next year Jigjid will retire from her job with the meat company and focus on building their product development into a successful business.

“I will have something to do,” she said happily. “I can see my future is secure.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The remains of an illegally hunted khulan. Credit: Courtesy Goviin Khulan

By Michelle Tolson
SOUTHERN GOBI REGION, Mongolia , Oct 24 2013 (IPS)

Decades of international and local collaboration have brought the Tahki or Asian Wild Horse back from the brink of extinction and reintroduced herds to Mongolia’s Gobi desert and grasslands. However, the country’s other wild equine – the Mongolian Wild Ass or Khulan – is fast disappearing.

It was put on the IUCN red list of endangered species in 2008.

“The Khulan (Equus hemionus hemionus) get less attention compared to the Tahki, which is nationally cherished,” says Mongolia-based French ethologist Anne-Camille Souris, who has worked on wild equine projects such as the International Tahki Group since 2003.

“There is research,” she tells IPS, “but little action.” According to her, there are 2,000 Tahki worldwide and 14,000 Khulan. But while the former’s population is growing, the numbers of this subspecies of the Asiatic Wild Ass are falling steadily.

In 2007, Souris co-founded the not-for-profit organisation Goviin Khulan. “We cooperate with local scientists and specialists, authorities, rangers, governors of each administrative subdivision, schools, Buddhist monasteries and the local population in our study area,” she says.

The organisation’s research area falls in the Southern Gobi Region (SGR), home to the largest population of Khulan. Two smaller and more remote populations are found in the Dzungarian Gobi and Transaltai Gobi to the west, but are cut off from the SGR population.

Most of the country’s mining activity takes place in the SGR, a mineral-rich region. But while the Mongolian government has designated special protected areas in the southwestern Dornogovi province and the southeastern Omnigobi province, the Khulan range extends far beyond them.

The Mongolian Wild Ass or Khulan is fast disappearing. Credit: Harlequeen/CC BY 2.0

The Khulan are also facing competition from domestic livestock, which are depleting foraging and water resources.

Climate change has affected Mongolia’s ecosystem significantly in the past two decades. The Mongolia: Assessment Report on Climate Change 2009 showed a 19 percent loss of surface water, a seven percent loss of grassland and 26 percent loss of forest, with “barren land” tripling from 52,000 sq km to 149,000 sq km. Of the 1,800 dug wells in the Dornogovi province, only about 1,000 still have water.

As a result, Khulan are now perceived as a threat by herders, who might often assist poachers who sell their meat. According to a national survey, the market-based economy spurred the rise of poachers – from 25,000 during the socialist days to 245,000 by 2008.

Souris, however, says that rather than a threat, Khulan are beneficial to domestic livestock as they are able to dig under the soil to find groundwater. Her organisation has documented domestic animals drinking from watering holes created by the Khulan.

Livestock population in the region increased considerably after the collapse of socialism in 1990 – from 762,000 to over five million currently.

The Gobi is the centre of Mongolia’s cashmere industry, which proved a lifeline after the switch to a market-based economy. Disadvantaged by China’s subsidised cashmere industry in Inner Mongolia, herders increased the number of goats to hedge against loss.

A 2010 World Bank report counts these among the factors contributing to an alarming decline in Khulan numbers, from 40,000 in the 1990s to 14,000 in the last count in 2009. Recent figures suggest a decline of 10 percent each year.

Another report, by the United Nations Environment Programme, the Convention on Migratory Species and the WWF Mongolia Programme Office, studied the impact of roads and train tracks on Khulan and other migratory species in Mongolia.

Titled Barriers to Migration; Case Study in Mongolia, the 2011 case study said how train tracks running north to south, from the Russian border to China, bisect the Gobi, thereby shrinking the Khulan’s range.

Herds on the eastern side of the tracks vanished after the railways were built. And with eight large mines in the region producing and transporting coal, one road to the border had a reported traffic of 500 coal trucks daily. The report concluded that the Khulan needed underpasses to travel safely.

The Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, one of the largest extraction projects in the country that is run jointly by the Mongolian government with private interests, plans to build a few such underpasses. However, its principal water adviser Mark Newby maintains that their current impact is small compared to coal transport.

Copper concentrate shipments, he tells IPS, “occur in convoys of 16 trucks, with up to three convoys currently going to the border per day.” That makes up about 50 trucks currently, with an increase of “up to six convoys” in the future.

Newby also says that paving what used to be a dirt road has not only improved the dust situation for herder families living alongside, but Khulan crossings too have been recorded. Twenty Khulan were collared for the project to track their movements.

Oyu Tolgoi also conducted an aerial survey from May to July. “In 2008, academics, researchers and world experts on ungulate species suggested [doing an aerial survey],” Dennis Hosack, principal adviser in the Biodiversity Offsets at the Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, which has a controlling stake in the mining project, tells IPS.

Currently in the data analysis stage, its progress can be followed on a blog on the subject.

By contrast, the largely government-owned Tavan Tolgoi coal mine has yet to collaborate on Khulan preservation, although Souris says she hopes it will.

To raise awareness on Khulan vulnerabilities, the Goviin Khulan association has also been partnering with the monks of Ulgii Hiid in Dornovobi province since 2008, as well as with the monks at Khamariin Khiid near the Dornogovi provincial capital Sainshand, and the Tributary Fund and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, using Buddhist principles to preserve natural resources.

It also dedicated a day in September – Sep. 18 – to “bring in Mongolian artists and act as a bridge to Mongolian culture and natural protection,” says Souris. “There are very few paintings of wild species; mostly they show nomadic, domestic life,” she adds.
Choimjants, a monk at Ulgii Hiid, donated a work of art featuring camels, Khulan and two famous monks. “These monks have worked on their own initiative, but it shows the important impact our work to protect the Khulan has locally,” Souris adds.

Local artist S. Tugs-Oyun, celebrated for her paintings of Mongolia, is excited about the initiative. “People want money these days, but we have to take care of nature,” she tells IPS.

The steppes of central Mongolia, the part of the country where exploration for oil shale is taking place. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
TOV PROVINCE, Mongolia , Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

Mongolia, 90 percent dependent on fuel imports from Russia and vulnerable to price hikes, is seeking to develop its oil shale deposits of at least 800 billion tons.

The country recently signed a five-year agreement with U.S. company Genie Energy to explore oil shale “in situ”.

Oil shale is essentially oil trapped in solid form within rock. Shale oil, also known as kerogen, is produced by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution, by contrast with shale gas, which is extracted by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

Jason Bane, communications director of Western Resources Advocates, an environmental group based in the U.S. state of Colorado, explained that while the United States has some of the largest shale oil reserves in the world, they are not commercially viable yet.

“In Estonia they burn oil shale for energy like you would burn coal, which is not overly complicated. But squeezing kerogen [a fossilised material in shale that yields oil upon heating] out of a rock is a different idea entirely. Small amounts of fuel have been produced at various points, but a commercial process is only theoretical,” he told IPS.

“If it were possible, oil shale production would be incredibly harmful to the environment, through air pollution and intensive water use,” he added.

Experts say Mongolia is especially vulnerable to climate change. This landlocked Central Asian country is already experiencing water shortages in the Gobi desert, shrinking rivers and lakes, and desertification.

Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, told IPS that “Most efforts to turn this type of resource into a liquid fuel have failed financially. It has a lower energy density than coal and worse environmental impacts. This would be a disaster for Mongolia.”

However, Jeremy Boak, director of the Centre for Oil Shale Technology and Research (COSTAR) at the Colorado School of Mines, challenges this. According to him, the technology is being rapidly developed and holds commercial promise. “The opposition is citing data that is decades old,” he told IPS.

“[Environmental groups] commonly cite a [U.S.] Government Accountability Office report that simply reviewed all historic data, and concluded that the average [water] use would be five barrels of water per barrel of oil, with the possibility of numbers up to 12.”

Boak said while experimental, the technology is not untested. “Shell has experience in Colorado. Water use is now about one barrel of water for one barrel produced,” referring to unconventional energy expert Harold Vinegar, a chief scientist at Genie Energy, who previously worked with Shell.

Vinegar had conducted pilot testing on oil shale technology but retired after Shell stopped the research. Then he joined Genie.

“One cannot equate potential environmental impacts with certain environmental catastrophe, as some groups have tended to do,” Boak said.

Geoscientist David Hughes with the Post Carbon Institute is aware of Vinegar’s work in Shell.

“The heating of shale underground to extract the oil lasts up to three or four years,” he told IPS. “The freeze wall [developed while Vinegar was signed on with Shell] is to prevent groundwater from invading the heating process. Shell shut down the process but declared the freeze wall to be a success. There will have to be a lot of pilot testing—we’re talking years and years.”

Perhaps because the process is still being tested, transparency has been lacking. Sukhgerel Dugersuren, director of Oyu Tolgoi Watch, a Mongolian environmental NGO, didn’t know about the agreement with Genie until Canadian anti-tar sands and shale activist Macdonald Stainsby contacted her shortly after the announcement.

Sukhgerel set a meeting for local environmental groups to get some oversight started. “Only one person I contacted personally came,” she told IPS. “But that was still useful as she represents the professionals who do the EIAs [environmental impact assessments]. I am very hopeful that she will spread the news to evaluation companies.”

Sukhgerel and Stainsby also learned another company, MAK from Mongolia, is working on oil shale projects near the Gobi desert.

Stainsby told IPS “I was not able, nor was Sukhgerel, to determine where the Genie plant would be located; this was not advertised – the government did not list either site [MAK or Genie] nor did it give coordinates.”

They eventually learned Genie was exploring in the Tov province near Ulaanbaatar after parliament released the information in late spring. Only one foreign media outlet reported Genie had licenses in the Tov province, near the Tuul River

Pastoralists upstream from the Tuul in the next province, close to where it merges with the Orkhon River, told IPS about Genie’s presence. Dashdavaa, a herder in her sixties, said “Four or five new families came here because they had to move from Genie’s work. There is not enough grass now and water for all these families here.”

Her neighbour Tsetseghkorol, a woman who has lived 40 years along the river, said they don’t know much about Genie’s project, just that they are looking for oil and possibly want to build a plant.

IPS contacted the Ministry of Environment and Green Development several times to obtain more information, but received no reply.

Mongolia is part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which publishes information on licenses, taxes and royalties paid to governments. When contacted, a spokesperson said they did not have information on the Mongolia-Genie agreement yet.

IPS also contacted Genie’s headquarters in the U.S. several times by phone and email, but did not receive an official reply.

Mongolia is keen on investment. Although it is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, foreign direct investment this year is 42 percent down from last year. Minister of Mining D. Gankhuyag has said he looks to oil shale as a welcome new investment opportunity.

“The Mongolian government has always tried to find a balance between economic development, and conservation of the environment and culture of which they are justifiably proud,” said Rebecca Watters, director of the Mongolian Wolverine Project, which studies the impact climate change has had on the shrinking habitat of the endangered species.

“The timelines involved in thinking about climate impacts are much longer than the timelines involved in a 50-year mine development, but I hope that they give consideration to these issues all the same,” she told IPS.

Ochir Damchaa chuckles as he drives his second-hand Toyota sedan through the alleyways of Nalaikh, a ramshackle town 35 kilometres east of Ulaanbaatar: “There’re just two kinds of jobs here: drive a taxi, or dig coal.”

Nalaikh was once a major Soviet-era industrial hub, and the site of Mongolia’s first mine. Today, though, the town is littered with ruins of former factories, such as Mongolia’s only glassworks. Residents continue to work as freelance miners on the grounds of the former state-owned coalmine. But jobs are scarce in Nalaikh, as in every other small town across Mongolia.

Despite rapid, mining-driven economic growth, Mongolia is experiencing persistent unemployment, a widening income gap, and a 30 percent poverty rate. The country’s leaders are now promising to diversify the economy, aiming to create jobs that push more people above the poverty line.

Mongolia’s massive Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mine started shipping copper concentrate to China in early July. By 2020, the joint-venture between Canada’s Rio Tinto, Anglo-Australian firm Turquoise Hill and the Mongolian government is projected to account for about 35 percent to GDP, according to Oyu Tolgoi’s website.

Mongolia at present appears to be at high risk of suffering from so-called Dutch Disease, an economic condition in which a nation’s economy becomes overly dependent on the export of natural resources. Mining currently contributes about a third of GDP and accounts for 89.2 percent of the country’s total exports, according to data compiled by Oxford Business Group.

But the sector employs only about four percent of the entire workforce. Inversely, the traditional agricultural sector – livestock for meat and wool – employs about 40 percent of the workforce and contributes less than 15 percent of GDP, according to the same data.

The transition from a largely agricultural economy to one dominated by mining has contributed to disproportionate growth and exacerbated a problem in Mongolia, dubbed the “missing middle”, says Saurabh Sinha, senior economist at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ulaanbaatar.

“On the one hand you have the mining sector which is running away and driving the entire economy and on the other hand you have the agriculture, the livestock and nomadic lifestyle. And between these two, the urban manufacturing sector is really scant and limited,” Sinha says.

This wasn’t always so. Mongolia’s manufacturing sector comprised about a third of the economy in 1988, just before the collapse of communism. In 2011, the figure was seven percent, according to Oxford Business Group.

The decline, Sinha points out, is partly due to the collapse of many state-owned factories following the transition to a market-oriented system. He believes options for reviving manufacturing in the country are limited given the small population and poor infrastructure.

President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, re-elected for a second term in early July, has promised to promote economic diversification policies, but years of talk about the development of non-mining sectors have produced little, says Sukhgerel Dugersuren of OT Watch, a non-profit that monitors the impact of Oyu Tolgoi.

“Ten years ago Mongolia started talking about economic diversification: improving its competiveness, developing the IT sector, developing eco-tourism,” she said. But she believes the attention on mining has adversely affected growth in other sectors over that period.

“Economic diversification simply means not putting all your eggs in one flimsy basket,” Dugersuren says, referring to the Oyu Tolgoi mine. “A nation that is dependent on one corporation for 35 percent of its GDP is not in a safe place.”

In April, Ulaanbaatar demonstrated its support for agricultural development with 86.2 million dollars in soft loans for cashmere companies, garment industries and dairy producers. But limited private investment and scant infrastructure continue to check the agriculture sector’s growth potential, according to French entrepreneur and dairy expert Didier le Goff, who started a cheese factory on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar in 2010.

“Mining is fast money for a short time, agriculture is slow money forever,” says le Goff.

He believes Mongolia has a unique potential to become an exporter of “organic bio-products” given the country’s nomadic heritage. But he admits sourcing local milk year round is difficult and enormous challenges still exist to rebuild and streamline supply chains in the vast country.

A 2009 report from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted that 70 percent of milk consumed in urban Mongolia was reconstituted from imported milk powder, despite a livestock population of over 30 million animals – or about 10 animals per every Mongolian citizen.

Jim Dwyer, director of the Business Council of Mongolia, a private business lobby, agrees that developing the agricultural sector is Mongolia’s best bet to diversifying its economy. He argues the government must reinvest mining wealth in infrastructure and social services to generate broad employment.

There are some signs authorities are listening. Earlier this year, Ulaanbaatar raised 1.5 billion dollars in its first-ever bond offering. Though authorities announced plans to spend a large share of the money, about 850 million dollars, on improving infrastructure across the country and to support the mining sector with construction of a new power plant and a new railroad, about 145 million dollars was earmarked for improving cashmere production technology, dairy production and wool industries.

“Agriculture is one thing we do have here. When the Russians left in 1990, the country was self-sufficient, even exporting various food products. There’s tremendous opportunity here with the [mining] money to bring that back to life,” says Dwyer.

Editor’s note:  Pearly Jacob is a freelance journalist based in Ulaanbaatar. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

A major diversion project threatens to choke Mongolia's Orkhon River, the longest in the country. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
SELENGE PROVINCE, Mongolia, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

Tsetseghkorol, a Mongolian herder, stares out nostalgically at the Orkhon River, the longest in the country.

“In 1992, the river used to be wide, deep and clean,” she says. “Now it is very polluted and small.”

Sitting with her neighbour Dashdavaa in a ‘ger’, a traditional Mongolian yurt used by herders across this vast Central Asian country, Tsetseghkorol tells IPS she has lived alongside the 1,124-km-long Orkhon for 40 years, raising five children and a herd of livestock with little more than the natural bounty of the river basin.

Dashdavaa, also a herder, is in her 60s, with nine grown children. She moved closer to a tributary of the Orkhon River in 1992 after the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, when she lost her job as a kindergarten teacher.

Like many Mongolians at the time, she returned to her pastoralist roots to support her large family, and now views this river as a critical lifeline.

Though shrinking from climate change, the Selenge river basin, comprised in part by the Orkhon River, is still lush compared to the 72 percent of the country facing desertification.

Covering 343,000 square km, the basin provides a livelihood to 55 percent of Mongolia’s population of 2.9 million people.

As idyllic as this valley seems, a threat lurks not too far away: the potential destruction of this ancient way of life by the proposed Orkhon River Diversion Project, which, according to the NGO Rivers Without Boundaries, is funded by the World Bank.

Currently in its feasibility-study phase, the project is a government scheme to build a dam several kilometres upstream from Tsetseghkorol and Dashdavaa, 35 km southwest of the northern city of Bulgan, in order to pump water through a 900-km-long underground pipeline into the parched Southern Gobi Region, which could run out of groundwater in the next 10 years unless additional water sources are promptly located.

A website detailing the Orkhon project revealed there is a possibility of building a reservoir with a capacity of 700 to 800 million cubic metres, as well as a 25-to-30-megwatt (MW) hydropower station on the river.

While this project intends to draw just five percent of the Orkhon River’s total supply, experts say the percentage volume will vary depending on the time of year: the river is always much thinner during the dry season, while most of the surface water is frozen throughout the winter months (November through April); so the river will face a particularly heavy assault during those periods of scarcity.

“Given that the Orkhon, including Tuul [its tributary] is already the most exploited river basin in Mongolia, even an additional five-percent withdrawal may cause serious problems,” Eugene Simonov, a conservation science specialist at Pacific Environment and coordinator of the Rivers without Boundaries coalition, told IPS.

According to a report from Mongolia’s Water Centre, the water will travel south through eight population centres, with the final destinations being the massive government-owned Tavan Tolgoi coal mine and Oyu Tolgoi copper mine.

The latter, located 350 km from the capital, Ulaanbaatar, is expected to increase the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 30 percent and is currently valued at 6.6 billion dollars.

Mining is taking a heavy toll on the region, with herders in the Gobi desert reporting that dug wells, their traditional water sources, are drying up as a result of the mines, which guzzle an estimated 191,230 cubic metres of water every day, far surpassing the combined consumption of livestock herds (31,600 cubic metres) and residents (just 10,000 cubic meters), according to the 2010 World Bank water assessment for the Southern Gobi Region.

Enkhat, director of the ministry of environment and green development, told IPS that the water shortage is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed “immediately”, citing the diversion project as a step in the right direction.

While the ministry has identified herders and locals in the Gobi desert as the main beneficiaries of the project, feasibility reports show the mining industry is expected to swill no less than 50 percent of the water, while 30 percent will go to crop irrigation and only 20 percent to livestock, household use and environmental purposes.

Thousands of herders rely on rivers to water their livestock herds. Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

This ratio bodes badly for an agricultural region that supplies 40 percent of the country’s wheat needs and where 100,000 residents are dependent on the river to water their crops and their roughly 1.3 million head of cattle.

Furthermore, the project will solidify the region’s relationship with miners by soliciting funds and contracts from extraction companies in order to meet the project’s exorbitant costs.

Initially the cost of conveyance was found to be too high compared to the cost of accessing existing groundwater sources, making the project “unfeasible”, but rising prices of groundwater over the last few years have made surface water projects much more attractive.

From about eight cents per cubic metre, the cost of groundwater has risen to 1.07 to 6.74 dollars for a single cubic metre, depending on the quality of the water source.

The price increase, implemented to prevent industrial overuse of the scarce resource, represents a major setback for the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, jointly owned by the Canadian corporation Rio Tinto and the Mongolian government, at 66 percent and 34 percent respectively.

The original mining contract stipulated that Rio Tinto would draw its water needs from a saline aquifer that the project’s researchers located 35 km from the construction site in 2003.

The mining ministry confirmed to IPS that Rio Tinto had been granted the use of 20 percent of this aquifer for a 40-year period.

But according to Oyu Tolgoi’s water resources principal advisor, Mark Newby, the price hike has resulted in the company footing a water bill that is “40 times higher than previously agreed.”

Higher prices have also made alternative sources, such as water drawn from alluvial deposits, cost ineffective. Classified as ‘groundwater’ because it resides under the Orkhon riverbed, water extracted from alluvium would cost three times as much as surface water.

According to Simonov, this encourages reservoir construction, which obstructs the natural flow of the river and harms the fragile ecosystem.

The Taishir Dam, for instance, constructed against the wishes of the community in western Mongolia in 2008, has negatively affected indigenous nomads, endangered species like the Pallas’s Fish Eagle, and led to the untimely deaths of livestock by drying out the Zavkhan River.

“Giant infrastructure projects for which international finance institutions are providing soft loans are the best option for corporations or contractors and lazy development organisations that derive a benefit from them. They [the projects] usually serve the interests of large businesses, not the local population,” Simonov said, adding, “Prestige Group [the Mongolian engineering firm in charge of the project] has always favoured in-stream reservoir construction, the most costly and environmentally destructive option.”

Dashdavaa and Tsetseghkorol looked stricken when asked for their opinion on the proposed project. Sitting in their gers without a television, they have been unaware of the broadcast advertisements proclaiming that water will be brought to the Gobi from the Orkhon.

These humble subsistence herders thought the project, already on the table for a few years, had been cancelled in response to the local outcry.

Though they understand that people need water in the Gobi, they said that if the project goes through, “We will become like the Gobi ourselves.”

*The story moved on Jul. 19, 2013, incorrectly stated that the Oyu Tolgoi copper mine plans to take advantage of the Orkhon River Diversion Project. Mark Newby, water resources principal advisor for the mine, informed IPS that Oyu Tolgoi will not utilise water from the river diversion project for its operations.

A camel outside a traditional Mongolian felt tent (yurt). Credit: Michelle Tolson/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, May 6 2013 (IPS)

Genghis Khan knew about hard times. The founder of the Mongol Empire, which spanned most of Eurasia until roughly 1227, Genghis and his clan had to survive on their wits and natural surroundings, often resorting to meals of “green leafy things” when food was scarce.

Today that history seems to have been lost, with most Mongolians dismissing fruits, vegetables and cultivation as “unmanly”, according to Marissa Markowitz, a food security consultant with the ministry of industry and agriculture (MoIA).

Less than one percent of the country’s land is used for crop production. Instead, following the instincts of their ancestors who were primarily nomadic herders, Mongolians rely on livestock for their food needs, guiding massive herds across the vast grasslands of the Central Asian Steppes.

The Soviet-era meat and dairy industries that flourished here between 1921 and 1990 collapsed along with the Soviet Union, robbing Mongolians not only of the centralised economic structure that had regulated production and distribution for years, but also of major markets for their products, tipping the country towards food insecurity.

One third of households in urban provincial centres and the capital, Ulaanbaatar, were found to be food insecure in 2009, according to a seminal study by Mercy Corps.

The standard diet here is comprised of wheat, meat and rice, said Markowitz, citing reports by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Research released by the ministry of health in 2008 and 2010 revealed that a full third of the country’s population of three million eat no fruits or vegetables at all.

Vegetables and fruits are expensive compared to the monthly minimum wage of about 100 dollars. Spring is a particularly difficult period, when national food stores are depleted and prices skyrocket – during this time, local sea buckthorn berries sell for about three to four dollars a kilo; carrots for roughly two dollars a kilo and tomatoes for nearly four dollars a kilo.

A severe lack of storage capacity in rural areas and informal settlements known as “ger districts” — shantytowns comprised of traditional Mongolian felt tents, or yurts — exacerbates the problem, with transportation costs adding to the price.

The poverty index is 23.4 percent in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with 60 percent of the city’s one million residents living in informal settlements or shantytowns.

A fifth of Mongolian children under the age of five are stunted, according to the MoIA’s statistics on malnutrition.

Experts on food security are also concerned about extreme desertification brought on by the introduction of a market-based food system, which saw herds increase by 20 million heads between 1999 and 2007.

Bringing back gardens

In light of these alarming trends, the country has recently embarked on the slow process of rebuilding its agricultural sector.

In the northwestern Songino Khairkhan district in Ulaanbaatar, in a neighbourhood crowded with gers surrounded by wooden fences, a two-acre farm flanked by snow-capped mountains is thriving. Warm greenhouses nurture vegetable seedlings and, outside, the hardy sea buckthorn bush saplings are preparing to explode into ripe orange fruit.

This is the headquarters of the Mongolian Women Farmers Association (MWFA), a volunteer-led NGO that works in all 21 of Mongolia’s provinces to promote vegetable and fruit cultivation among poor families.

The climate here – cold and dry with a short growing season from May until September – is ideal for potatoes, beets, cabbage, carrots, onions and radishes, which can be stored during the long winter months when temperatures drop to minus 40 degrees Celsius.

But a survey published by the Mercy Corps showed that despite 40 percent of the urban poor having access to land, only six percent grew their own vegetables – and even these families cultivated the produce for their own personal use rather than additional income.

Markowitz, coordinator of the project, says the NGO has already worked with 4,500 families on “enhanced nutrition and resource conservation”, and supported vegetable gardens as a “viable way to generate household income”. MWFA also teaches families how to cook and preserve vegetables by canning.

The organisation hopes this will reduce dependence on Russian and Chinese imports that typically flood the local market during the cold season that lasts from October through April.

A volunteer named Tuya told IPS the farm is very popular among locals, particularly for their cultivation of sea buckthorn, which thrives in Mongolia’s harsh weather and helps to stem desertification.

Over 30 grafted varieties of the plant grow in the central and northeastern parts of the country. The yellow berry, known as a “super plant,” is high in vitamin C, omega-3 fatty acids and can remove toxins in the body. Families freeze harvested berries in the winter, and often turn them into juice for a quick meal.

In 2007, the far-western Uvs province, considered the birthplace of wild buckthorn domestication in the 1940s, attained the coveted geographic indicator status, comparable to the Champagne region in France, which ensures a higher price for specialised produce. Today, Uvs supplies the nation with 60,000 saplings yearly, according to a FAO case study.

In addition to helping spread sea buckthorn plants, MWFA has published two books and 30 texts on agriculture, using their greenhouses as teaching aids. They also provide free classes to the local community in the surrounding ger districts.

One of the teachers, Bayraa, told IPS classes span twenty days and instruct individuals interested in subsistence agriculture or entrepreneurs aiming to start a business.

Some teachers travel to the countryside to impart knowledge of vegetable cultivation to populations in more remote provinces.

It remains to be seen if sea buckthorn berries or vegetables can stand alongside meat or dairy as a traditional Mongolian meal, even though agricultural production was practiced on the steppes as far back as 2,000 years ago.

Today, Ulaanbaatar boasts over 20 vegetarian restaurants, helping to fuel a demand for local greens and reduce the impact of herding on the country.

If the expansion of agriculture here is successful, Mongolia could build a different kind of empire to Genghis Khan’s – one with nutrition and food security at its core.

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAAR, Mongolia, May 5 2013 (IPS)

When the food-strapped Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) appealed to the Mongolian government for food last month, it signaled a major turning point in the public image of this Central Asian country, which has long struggled to feed its own population of three million.

Transformed from a nation of nomads into an industrial agricultural exporter during its time as a Soviet satellite state between 1921 and 1990, the country’s food production systems suffered a sudden crash after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Families went back to subsistence agriculture, but herding under a privatised market economy created unsustainable livestock populations and overgrazing, as a result of which Mongolia now has an estimated 78 percent desertification rate.

As recently as 2008, the country imported two-thirds of its wheat, one third of its potatoes and most of its milk products in urban areas, according to a United States Department of Agriculture report.

But new initiatives by the government and private sector to revive food production here have taken Mongolians back to their roots as small-scale cultivators, utilising the short growing season on the Central Asian Steppes to plan trees and the nutritious sea buckthorn bushes to protect the topsoil.

Tuya, a member of the Mongolian Women Farmers Association (MWFA) told IPS that imported vegetables are too expensive for the rural and urban poor living in informal “tent cities” across the country. So the new cultivation initiatives offer a way out of malnutrition and food insecurity.

According to government studies, a full third (33 percent) of Mongolians eat no vegetables at all.  The poor suffer from heart disease, stunting in children, high blood pressure, obesity, malnutrition and alcoholism. The MWFA, a volunteer-led civil society organisation, has been teaching ger-district and rural residents how to grow and cook vegetables to improve both their income and health.

The mining project has been the focus of longstanding complaints from local herder communities. Credit: Zingaro/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

The United States has refused to vote for involvement by the World Bank Group in a massive but controversial mining project in Mongolia.

In abstaining, the U.S. representative cited concerns over the potential environmental consequences and an inadequate impact study of the mine plan.

The Oyu Tolgoi mine, a 12-billion-dollar project, is looking to massively expand copper-and-gold extraction in the South Gobi Desert. Its parent company, the London-based Rio Tinto, is currently fielding funding proposals from multiple international investors, including the World Bank Group.

If the four-billion-dollar expansion goes forward, income from the mine could make up a third of the gross domestic product in Mongolia, which has significantly expanded its mining sector in recent years. On Wednesday, Rio Tinto stated that it was on track to begin operations by June.

Criticism of the plan has been widespread, however, with local communities and international civil society warning that concerns are being pushed aside and that the World Bank’s own safeguard guidelines are not being followed. It now appears that the U.S. backs some of this apprehension.

“[T]he United States’ review of the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) for the project has raised concerns in a number of areas,” a position paper, dated late February but publicly released this week, states.

“First, the United States believes the ESIA has gaps in critically important information, particularly related to the operations phase of the project and mine closure … Second, the ESIA does not provide a sufficiently detailed analysis of associated facilities and cumulative impacts.”

In particular, the policy statement notes that the impact assessment, which currently focuses almost exclusively on the project’s construction rather than its potential operation, covers this planned expansion “only lightly”. (The U.S. Treasury declined request for additional comment.)

The document also draws attention to longstanding complaints from local herder communities, currently pending before a World Bank Group auditor. The U.S. says it is “keenly interested in the outcome” of this review.

Missing management plan

The U.S. position will not halt the funding proposal, which was greenlighted last week by the board of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm. The institution will now work with Rio Tinto to decide on a funding package.

The IFC, which is reportedly offering up to 900 million dollars in loans for the project, is joined in its interest by numerous other multinational donors and investors. These include the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD, which also approved a 1.4 billion dollar loan last week), the U.S. Export-Import Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and several others.

Yet the U.S. explanation for its abstention may now strengthen civil society recommendations on how to improve the Oyu Tolgoi project.

“Without valourising the U.S. government, what they have said on this project is important – they have made some very reasonable recommendations, many of which overlap with our own,” Jelson Garcia, manager of the Asia programme at the Bank Information Center (BIC), a Washington-based watchdog, told IPS.

“The challenge is how these recommendations will be reflected in the loan agreement and in the updated management plan. Otherwise, it will be hard to hold the company accountable.” (BIC has an extensive resource on the project here.)

As noted in the U.S. policy statement, one of the major complaints by critics is that the IFC only entered the Oyu Tolgoi project very late. By the time the IFC’s required ESIA was filed, more than 90 percent of construction had been finished, and the assessment only covered the construction phase.

Nonetheless, when the project came up for a vote last week, as the United States noted, “the Boards of the IFC and EBRD [were] being asked to make a decision on this project without seeing the agreed commitments contained in the forthcoming Operations Phase Environmental Management Plans”.

Extensive civil society analyses of the probable impacts of the full-scale operation are available, however. These detail the mine’s intensive use of water in a desert area, as well as its plan to divert the Undai River, the major waterway in the area, which flows through the mine’s planned open pit.

In addition, environmentalists are disturbed over a reported plan to build a 750-megawatt coal-fired power plant at the site, with which to power operations. According to a November brief prepared for the Sierra Club, a U.S. conservation group, this would contravene both IFC and World Bank Group guidelines.

Additionality

Last month, the IFC released an extensive public response to many of these concerns. It notes that the Oyu Tolgoi management has not made a final decision on long-term power sources, that the mine would be allowed to use only 20 percent of the water in a major local aquifer, and that the ESIA does include content on the mine’s operation.

The response also points out that the nomadic herders are not formally considered indigenous peoples, and hence are not covered under more stringent safeguards.

The project “is compliant with our sustainability policy and environmental and social standards,” the IFC said in a statement e-mailed to IPS. “The financing will not be concluded before certain key environmental management plans have been agreed to and publically disclosed. During the span of our proposed financing, IFC will actively monitor the project to ensure continued compliance with our standards.”

Alongside, the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO), an independent body charged with response to complaints from communities affected by IFC projects, has accepted two cases (here and here) stemming from the Oyu Tolgoi project, including one last week.

These relate particularly to the project’s use of land and water, including the plan to divert the UndaiRiver. “The complainants contend they have not been compensated or relocated appropriately, and question the project’s due diligence, particularly around the issue of sustainable use of water in an arid area,” CAO notes.

Both assessments are ongoing.

According to BIC’s Garcia, such concerns raise questions about IFC’s involvement in the project in the first place.

“Given that IFC is not a major source of financing for this project, the main argument from the institution is over the ‘additionality’ it brings, specifically its performance standards and requirements for environmental and social issues,” he says.

“But we and many others have identified multiple flaws in exactly those assessments, even though the project has now been accepted. So the additionality here is highly questionable.”

Local communities fear mining projects will heighten the southern Gobi desert's water shortage and threaten livestock. Credit: Linh Vien Thai /CC-BY-ND-2.0

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, Nov 30 2012 (IPS)

The Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in the southern Gobi desert in Mongolia has become a symbol of a looming crisis: a limited water supply that could be exhausted within a decade, seriously threatening the lives and livelihoods of the local population.

Oyu Tolgoi is one of the largest copper deposits in the world and has attracted major investors over the years, from Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Capital Corporation, to the mining giant Rio Tinto, which now holds a majority stake in the investment, while the Mongolian government controls just 34 percent of the project.

Now, local communities fear that returns on investments will take precedence over their own subsistence, while simultaneously heightening the region’s acute water shortage.

A 2010 World Bank water assessment report for the southern Gobi region projected a “lifespan” for water resources based on the number of mining projects in the pipeline, as well as a study of the region’s growing population whose primary occupation is herding and rearing livestock.

The sparsely populated region, which consists of three aimags (provinces) occupying a combined area of 350,000 square kilometres, is home to 3.8 million livestock: 120,000 camels, 260,000 horses, 100,000 cows, and 3.4 million sheep and goats. Together these animals require an estimated 31,600 cubic metres of water daily.

Human consumption among the 150,000 residents in rural and urban settings across the southern Gobi is estimated at 10,000 cubic metres per day.

Subsistence herders must share a limited water supply with numerous mines. A 2009 World Bank report found that mining exploration licences cover 55 percent of this area. Omongovi province, for instance, “has 63 licences issued for extraction and 400 licences for exploration.”

Though not all these licences will be granted, the copper extraction process guzzles so much water that locals have good reason to worry: the World Bank assessment found that in 2010, Oyu Tolgoi used about 67,000 cubic metres of water a day, while the government-owned Tavan Tolgoi coal mine consumed 76,000 cubic metres daily.

D. Enkhat, director of the ministry of environment and green development, told IPS that Oyu Tolgoi’s water usage is closely monitored and does not exceed the maximum allowance of 870 litres per second for the construction phase.

But the fact remains that each mine’s water consumption was more than double that of all the livestock in the entire region.

Basing its projections on the total number of mines in the area, World Bank researchers concluded that current known water resources could last just 10 to 12 years, unless additional sources are promptly located and utilised.

Another option would be to divert water from the Orkhon River, considered a “partially renewable” source, experts say.  The Environment Ministry has clarified that the “first priority is for drinking water supply for locals, herders and mining workers”, but others fear that the mines will consume more than all these three combined.

Alternative water sources

In 2003, managers of the Oyu Tolgoi located a saline aquifer some 35 kilometres away from the mine. The pipeline connecting this aquifer to the project is already going through the commissioning stage.

Mark Newby, principal water resources advisor for Oyu Tolgoi, said that national authorities gave the miners permission to use just 20 percent of the water over a 40-year period, thus ensuring that 80 percent of the aquifer remains, as per regulations set by the Mongolian Water Authority.

The aquifer is not expected to impact the shallow herder wells that dot the desert, nor the large fresh water aquifer on which the nearby town of Khanbogd relies.

The government-owned Tavan Tolgoi, on the other hand, does not have access to a saline aquifer and might initially use fresh water sources such as Lake Balgas, also used by herders, or else rely on the river diversion project until other sources are located.

Mining and human rights

A recent mining and human rights conference held last month in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, provided a platform for herders, NGOs and local officials in the southern Gobi region to voice their concerns about the project to the central government.

Chondmani Dagva, governor of the Dungovi province, which lies directly north of the Omnigovi aimag, lamented his inability to halt the rapid clearance of mining licenses. He complained that local authorities have little power to protect their constituencies, given that mining licences are issued in the capital.

Herders, whose voices have been almost completely silenced in the rush to develop the region’s mining sector, simply expressed disbelief at the scale and possible impact of the projects.

One herder, representing 4,000 people from his soum, or sub-district, where four mines are already operating, said he fears not being to retain his camels and his livelihood.

“If that fifth mine opens, there will be no more livelihoods in my soum,” he said.

Sara Jackson, a PhD candidate in Geography at the Toronto-based York University, who is currently researching the impact of the Oyu Tolgoi on herders in the Gobi, told IPS, “(One of the herders told me) ‘the mining companies are telling us to have fewer animals, so basically they are telling us to be poor’.”

Herders have also hinted that the governor has been taking bribes from the mining companies, which comes as no surprise to experts familiar with the inner-workings of the Mongolian government – in 2011, Transparency International ranked the country 2.7 out of 10, two places away from “highly corrupt”.

But the mines are lucrative enough to drown out locals’ concerns. Oyu Tolgoi alone is expected to contribute about 30 percent of Mongolia’s gross domestic product (GDP) by the time the project is up and running in 2013.

It is unlikely that residents in the southern Gobi region will share in the spoils of these extraction projects. Khanbogd, the soum located closest to Oyu Tolgoi, is very poor in comparison to Ulaanbaatar, which has been the recipient of generous government funding.

In fact, according to local researchers, Khanbogd receives the smallest revenue from the central government of any soum or aimag.

(END)

Amnesty International has found evidence of horrific abuses inside Mongolia’s prisons, such as torturing and starving detainees to death. Credit: Ranmali Bandarage/IPS

By Michelle Tolson
ULAANBAATAR, Nov 28 2012 (IPS)

Tucked away from the scrutiny of civil society, Mongolia’s jails epitomise the limits of democracy in this county of 2.8 million people, where marginalised members of society often bear the brunt of a corrupt and under-resourced justice system.

“Mongolia is a democratic country and has been for 22 years,” Geleg Baasan, a human rights activist who heads the Centre for Protection of Breaches on Human Rights (CPBHR), told IPS, referring to the country’s development following nearly seven decades as a Soviet satellite state from 1921 until 1990.

“But this democratic transition has not yet (extended) to the jails,” she said. Having been arrested five times during the course of her decades-long career as an activist, she speaks from firsthand experience of a discriminatory and corrupt legal apparatus.

According to Baasan, the most marginalised in Mongolian society tend to slip through the cracks and get lost in the country’s many ‘detention centers’ – pre-trial chambers that are even more dangerous than post-conviction facilities.

The famous activist became especially interested in the country’s prison system when, four years ago, “a child was locked up for seven years for stealing wine and a box of chocolates”.

“People who have committed a horrible crime can pay (to avoid detention) but people who have committed a petty crime go to jail because they don’t have any connections,” said Baasan.

Though Mongolian law states that citizens cannot be arrested without due process, the United States embassy’s human rights report for 2011 found “arbitrary arrest and detention” to be common.

The embassy also cited a United Nations report, which found that two-thirds of detainees in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar who were accused of criminal offenses had been arrested without court authorisation.

On the other hand, some groups were found to be above the law.

The U.S. embassy report noted, “Ultranationalist groups enjoyed impunity due to police complacency and unwillingness to apprehend the offenders. Ultranationalists targeted LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) persons, Chinese, and Koreans with threats, violence, and the extraction of protection money.”

Otgonbaatar Tsedendemberel, director of the LGBT Centre of Mongolia, told IPS that exact statistics, such as the number of LGBT persons who have died as a result of violent attacks, are very difficult to verify since authorities and even family members are keen to cover up the issue.

His organisation currently documents cases of imprisonment and abuses of members of the LGBT community using the U.N. human rights framework on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Baasan agreed that tampering with death records is a common practice within the police force, courts and prison system. “A murder can be made to look like suicide – it happens all the time,” she said.

Conditions on the inside

In 2002, Amnesty International released a report detailing horrific abuses inside Mongolia’s prisons, such as torturing and starving detainees to death.

“Those with no connections usually starve because they can’t get as much food as other people and can’t get out of the prison as fast,” said Baasan.

Holding back food is also used as a way to force pre-trial detainees to “confess” to crimes they may or may not have committed, though this practice has been on the decline in recent years.

A lack of state funding for prisons also means some inmates go without food for longer periods of time.

Civil society and human rights activists have challenged the Mongolian government on these poor conditions and in 2003 a group of organisations and activists demanded that special representatives and social workers be assigned to look after prisoners’ needs.

In response the government assigned 70 staff members from the prison administration as social workers, with nothing more than 30 hours of training.

“They might as well have had no training at all,” Cyril Jaurena, from the Czech NGO ‘Caritas’, told IPS.

In 2011, one of those original social workers, Orosoo Purevsuren, lieutenant martialist of the Court Decision Enforcement Agency (CDEA) working in one of the pre-trial detention centres, came to Caritas in search of proper training.  

Since 2003 Purevsuren has struggled to meet the legal and emotional needs of the prisoners, a gargantuan task given his lack of training and extremely scarce resources.

He told IPS that there are just 78 social workers and 26 psychologists for an inmate population of 5,899 prisoners in 24 prisons. “Counseling has been limited and we are working to address this,” he said.

According to Jaurena, “It can take up to six months for a prisoner to meet a social worker who often does not have answers to their questions.

“Some will say ‘I want to see my children,’ or ‘My wife is trying to sell my house – what can I do?’” Jaurena said, adding that most social workers are powerless to act on these grievances.

In an attempt to tackle this problem, Jaurena began a partnership with the Prosecutor’s Office of Mongolia, which has thus far been unsuccessful in compiling a comprehensive record of prisoners’ grievances.

Other than lamenting the quality of the food, prisoners seldom bring more serious complaints – such as reports of abuse at the hands of prison guards – to the Prosecutor’s Office, making it difficult for prison officials to verify and document human rights violations.

Now, with information supplied by NGOs and other non-state actors, “the prosecutor’s office is preparing to conduct a comprehensive survey, publish the results and hold a conference (about the findings)”, explained Jaurena.

“We are trying to establish international standards,” T. Munkhbayar, of the Prosecutor’s Office of Mongolia, told IPS at the project’s official launch on Oct. 30. “This is the first time civil society has worked with the government in the prison system.”

Caritas will oversee the project, while the CPBHR will mobilise its own pool of lawyers to provide legal training to social workers appointed by the Court Decision Enforcement Agency, assisted by licensed social work experts from the Prison Fellowship of Mongolia, an Australian NGO.

Though she has witnessed a great deal of corruption as an activist, Baasan feels hopeful.

“Mongolia looks very much like a democracy (from the outside) because the government has signed so many international conventions.  I have ten volumes of books about these conventions but they are not enforced and the lawyers that use them are extremely rare.”

She is confident that the election of the Democratic Party on Jun. 28, 2012, represents a turning of this tide. “We have a completely new government and I see it as a new era of democracy,” Baasan said.

(END)

If all goes as envisioned on Jun. 28, Mongolia’s parliament will no longer be a male bastion.

Supported by recent revisions to Mongolia’s election law, a record number of women are on the ballot in parliamentary elections on Jun. 28. They are seeking seats in what has traditionally been a male-dominated body.

Of the 544 candidates running for the 76-seat parliament, 174 are women – well above a newly established 20-percent quota. But where their names appear on the lengthy ballot may be a determining factor in whether this becomes a breakthrough occasion.

Currently, the proportion of women in the Ikh Khural, or parliament, ranks Mongolia near the bottom of the list of countries surveyed by the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union. Women’s rights activists say government policies and patriarchal attitudes have discouraged women from entering politics.

Data collected by research group Monfemnet even shows a gradual decline in the number of women elected to parliament in all elections since 2000, when women comprised 11.8 percent of the legislature. The figure dropped to 6.6 percent after the 2004 vote and to 3.9 percent in 2008.

“It’s a paradox that women … hold 70 percent of the jobs in the health and education sectors, and yet more than 90 percent of the people in positions of power are men,” says Otgonsuren Jargal, a veteran journalist and environmental activist who runs Nomad Green, a citizens’ environmental reporting initiative.

Jargal is a Green Party candidate contesting a single-seat electoral district in Sukhbaatar Province. She says she never could have dreamed of being nominated by her party were it not for the female quota.

“Now I know it’s possible. After working for six years in civil society, this is a great opportunity to share what I have learned and believe in … no matter if they vote for me or not,” she told EurasiaNet.org.

This election cycle is not the first time Mongolia has experimented with quotas to encourage female candidates. In 2005, after lobbying from women’s groups, political parties were told at least 30 percent of candidates must be women. The law was suddenly revoked just before the 2008 election, however, and never tested.

Members of Women for Social Progress (WSP), a non-governmental organisation based in Ulaanbaatar, believe the decision to rescind the 30-percent quota was made without substantive discussion. The experience underscores the lengths some MPs will go to limit the political participation of women in Mongolia, contends WSP Director Odmaa Davaanyam.

Davaanyam believes the reintroduction of a quota last year, though reduced to 20 percent, is thanks to pressure from advocacy groups. While it deserves to be lauded in theory, she argued that in practice it may not do much to change the status quo: that is because the new rules say nothing about where women should appear on party lists.

“If you look at the party lists, very few women are at the top,” Davaanyam says. “The law is written, but in real life parties are doing little to support women.”

Mongolia has a five percent threshold for a party to enter parliament and, according to the Sant Maral Foundation, a respected pollster, at least three parties are expected to win seats via this proportional system.

The proportional system allots 28 seats. That means it is unlikely a party can win more than a dozen seats. The two leading parties – the Democratic Party (DP) and the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP) – have nine and 11 women respectively on their 28-member lists. But DP’s first woman is placed at number seven; MPP’s at number 10.

“Women are still at the bottom of the list because (the law) hasn’t specified how that 20 percent quota is to be secured,” says Sukhjargalmaa Dugersuren, a former senior government aide who helped draft Mongolia’s gender equality law.

Dugersuren tops the party list for the Civil Movement Party (CMP), the first party to field an overwhelming 95 percent majority of female candidates. While her party has barely registered on pre-poll opinion surveys, and is not expected to secure any seats, Dugersuren is confident they have made their mark.

“All over the country people know there is a party that has nominated women intent on pushing for change,” she states.

Another change to the electoral code offers hope for female candidates, however: Not all seats are determined through party lists. The new, mixed voting system is expected to help the electoral chances of women, independents, and smaller parties.

Of the 76 seats in the Ikh Khural, 48 are to be determined in individual races.

In these lists of individual candidates, selected by district, but often associated with a party, women stand out, says Naranjargal Khaskhuu of Globe International, a Mongolian democracy watchdog.

“Women are perceived as less corrupt,” she says.

It is an important consideration in a country that ranks 120 out of 183 in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. She believes that because of growing discontent over the government’s handling of Mongolia’s vast mineral resources, voters are keen to see more women enter the legislature.

Khaskhuu is cautiously optimistic, hoping at least 10 women will win seats. But she remembers the last time.

“Take the 2008 elections,” she says, referring to the fact that only three women were elected that year from the 67 on the ballots. “It’s the results that prove if mentalities have changed. So far we haven’t had much evidence of that.”

Editor’s note: Pearly Jacob is a freelance journalist based in Ulaanbaatar.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.