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.

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.