Wide Open Spaces Mongolia is home to one of the last great temperate grasslands on Earth. © Matthieu Paley
Bujinlkham Tsengel gets up at dawn to tend to her flock. The 49-year-old herder milks the older goats and sheep first. Then she lets them graze among grasses near the base of snow-capped mountains.
Bujinlkham’s 400 or so animals are her livelihood. Their milk, fur and meat sustain her and others through Mongolia’s rugged landscape and harsh seasons. “Our animals define who we are as Mongolians,” she says. “Without our flock of animals, we can’t call ourselves nomadic Mongolians.”
Here in the Western Mongolia province of Khovd, the steep Altai Mountains loom over rivers and streams, which feed the region’s dark blue lakes. It’s September, and winter is already approaching. The soft greens of the grasslands around the flock are embellished with golden morning light, and the snowpack is increasingly spanning from the mountain tops to the lakes below.
Mongolia is enormous, and its sparse population makes the land feel even more vast. Its grand landscapes hold an abundance of natural beauty, from rolling hills and rugged mountains to sand dunes that abut open prairies. The country also holds the largest intact temperate grassland on Earth, carbon-heavy peatlands buried under permafrost and the headwaters of many critical rivers in Asia.
For thousands of years, Mongolians like Bujinlkham have relied on this natural abundance, embracing a nomadic-pastoral way of life to survive in this landscape’s extreme conditions. Historically these pastures have been accessible to all: Herders have driven their sheep, goats and other livestock across shared public grasslands. Even today, one-quarter of Mongolia’s households are nomadic herders.
But in the last three decades, Mongolians have seen dramatic social changes. In 1990, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country became a democracy and began the transition to a market economy. There was a shift toward urbanization—nearly 70% of residents now live in cities. Tourism has rapidly increased year over year. Mineral mining now accounts for a quarter of the country’s economy. And herders have increased their livestock exponentially to meet the market demands of a growing global cashmere industry.
All of these factors have put pressure on the country’s landscapes. About three-quarters of Mongolia’s grasslands have been overgrazed—and their health is worsened by climate change. Deforestation, mining and unpaved roads also contribute to land degradation. And, though herders have always had to contend with harsh conditions, disastrous winters have become increasingly frequent and severe. In 2024, 8.1 million animals died, unable to burrow through snow to reach grass to eat.
Amid these challenges, in April 2024, Mongolia announced a nearly $200 million effort that aims to protect the country’s landscapes while honoring generations of traditional knowledge and supporting sustainable livelihoods and futures. It will take at least 15 years to complete—and a major partnership of government officials, nongovernmental organizations, herders and others—but all told it could amount to one of the most ambitious land conservation efforts in the modern era.
The agreement was negotiated by the government of Mongolia, The Nature Conservancy and the Mongolian Nature’s Legacy Foundation within the framework of an international conservation collaboration called Enduring Earth. Enduring Earth was formed in 2021 by The Nature Conservancy, The Pew Charitable Trusts, World Wildlife Fund and ZOMALAB to bolster conservation efforts at a national scale not just in Mongolia but in countries all over the planet.
To kick-start the effort in Mongolia, The Nature Conservancy has facilitated $71 million in private and other global donations for a newly created conservation trust. The Mongolian government, for its part, will contribute an additional $127 million over 15 years. The government is still working out the details, but that money could come from adding an arrival fee for foreign tourists; increasing park entrance fees for foreign visitors; or collecting fees for natural resource extraction and impact fees from the country’s mining industry. The goal in the end is to make land use more sustainable for all.
One of the most promising ways to do that is by working with the people already out on the landscape—Mongolia’s herders—to protect the ecosystems on which they depend. “You need people who are educated to ensure natural habitat isn’t tampered with,” says Galbadrakh (Gala) Davaa, the country director for TNC Mongolia. “And the people who can do that are the ones who live next to these habitats.”
Mongolia has one of the longest histories of land conservation in the world. The country created one of the first legally protected land areas on Earth on Bogd Khan Mountain south of present-day Ulaanbaatar. And since the country’s constitution went into effect in the 1990s, Mongolia has placed 21% of its lands in protected areas. But scarce funding and varying levels of on-the-ground oversight have sometimes made effective protection difficult.
The 2024 land conservation deal, known as Eternal Mongolia, creates an opportunity to revise how wildlands are managed at a large scale. Under the deal, the government will expand its protected-areas network by 35 million acres, bringing the total amount of land under protection in Mongolia to 30% of the nation’s landmass. It will provide funding to strengthen management of the country’s existing protected-area system over the next decade. And it will expand work with Mongolia’s roughly 200,000 herding families to shift to more sustainable grazing practices across another 84 million acres of land outside of the national protected areas. The deal comes at a critical time.
“Climate change is here. Mongolians are already experiencing more frequent and severe climate-induced disasters like harsh winters, droughts and dust storms,” said Bat-Erdene Bat-Ulzii, the former minister of environment and tourism at the announcement of the deal. Between 1940 and 2015, Mongolia’s average temperature increased by about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, among the greatest increases on Earth.
For three decades, Bujinlkham has watched over her animals as they weathered increasing droughts and “dzuds.” Dzuds are a type of cold-season agricultural disaster in which mass numbers of animals are unable to burrow through snow or ice to graze. They’ve been occurring increasingly frequently and with greater severity. To make up for the lost animals, herders often increase the size of their herds, which can further degrade grasslands.
“Last year [the winter of 2023-24] was good, but we have faced harsh weather back to back since 2020,” Bujinlkham says. In 1999, she joined a community-based organization of fellow herders at the suggestion of a local ranger. “Thanks to our group, we were able to gather enough animal feed to weather through it.”
During Mongolia’s Communist era, from the 1920s to the 1990s, cooperatives were the norm, except that herders did not own their animals. When Mongolia became a democracy, herders were finally given ownership of the animals they took care of, but they also splintered away from cooperatives to work on their own.
More recently, though, herders have begun forming community-based organizations, looking for the benefits of working together rather than alone. They have found that pooling not only their work but also their earnings can yield more income overall. And conservationists have found it can help protect the environment from overgrazing.
Morning Chores
In Khövsgöl Province, for Galbadrakh Tserens and Narantuya Tseren, raising dairy cows for milk and meat is a family affair. Their daughter, Enkhjin, helps her mother with the daily work each summer, and the milk they gather is used to produce products like “aaruul,” a kind of dried cheese common in the region.
For nearly a decade, TNC Mongolia has worked with herders like Bujinlkham in 28 locations around Mongolia to form herding community-based organizations and help them get recognition from the local government. The Eternal Mongolia deal is set to help support these groups and expand them more widely across the country.
For herders to form a community-based organization, they must create a natural resource management plan. The Conservancy advises on plans and hosts training sessions. These sessions help herders explore new economic opportunities and make informed decisions about how their pasturelands can be managed in a way that protects natural habitats. The organization has also been teaching herders how to make their voices heard in front of government officials.
Today Bujinlkham leads her herding group of 10 families in Khovd Province. They share a large livestock pen, and they work together to comb goat hair into cashmere fiber and shear the wool from sheep.
Before they began working together to process materials, the individual herders sold raw hair and wool at a lower price point. “If you sell 5 kilograms [11 pounds] of raw lamb’s wool, you might earn 10,000 tugriks [$3],” Bujinlkham says. “But processed wool can sell for as much as 450,000 tugriks [$125].”
Because the herders earn more for their products, herders are able to rely on smaller herds. Bujinlkham’s herd of 400 animals is relatively small, and she earns an annual income of more than 15 million tugriks ($4,170). A typical household with 200-500 animals would need to double their herd size to make that much, based on average numbers from a 2023 survey on herder income and employment. Bujinlkham’s community-based organization also sometimes sells products they make, like plush toys, further diversifying their incomes. Thanks to the income from this group, Bujinlkham says, she was able to pay her three children’s university tuitions.
To make Eternal Mongolia a self-sustaining effort, the government has considered a number of ways to introduce long-term funding sources. Among them is a set of fees related to tourism. The government wants to rapidly increase tourism—and some estimates show the industry has recently increased nearly 10% year over year—but it recognizes the need to avoid overdeveloping tourism in protected areas.
Hustai National Park, just 50 miles outside Ulaanbaatar, is an example of an attempt to strike that balance. On an unseasonably warm December morning when the temperature hits a high of 3 degrees Fahrenheit, the park’s director, Dashpurev Tserendeleg, points toward a herd of Przewalski’s horses grazing through a hill pass dotted with lingering snow. The animals have a small but husky stature, dark manes and tan coloration. “We are the only park where you can see Przewalski’s horses” up close like this, he says.
Przewalski’s horses—or “takhi,” as they’re known to Mongolians—are the only equine breed never to be domesticated. They went extinct in the wild in the 1960s. With their reintroduction to the park in 1992, Hustai has seen the number of horses increase over the years. Other wildlife, like marmots and red deer, have also increased there, and the park is now one of the main sources of animals for wildlife reintroductions to other parts of Mongolia.
“Eighty percent of our funding comes from the tourists who want to see the horses,” Dashpurev says, noting that this tourism has allowed the park to be self-sustaining. “We haven’t received a single dime from taxpayers since our last funding finished in 2012.”
Dashpurev says the park’s success can be attributed to a number of elements, including its initial designation for the Przewalski’s horse, its independence from the government, its closeness to the city and its strong communal relationships with inhabitants in the area. Hustai gained success through initial funding from international donors as well as close cooperation with local communities, which today make up the majority of its workforce.
Dashpurev says he has seen firsthand how changes to environmental laws and policies can help or hurt habitats for the wildlife reintroduced from Hustai to other areas—including policies that have the potential to undermine biodiversity initiatives like Eternal Mongolia. In 2019, for example, a government ruling revoked the licenses of many small-scale mining operations. The unintended result was that previously licensed operators, which had been required by law to avoid the use of mercury and to rehabilitate land after mining, simply continued mining but without those safety and environmental requirements. It’s the type of rule that demonstrates the continual challenge of balancing economic development—be it mining or the growth of tourism—with conservation nationwide.
In August 2024, an experienced contractor, alongside a local herder, placed GPS tracking collars on 59 sheep grazing in the northwestern province of Khövsgöl. Home to Lake Khövsgöl—one of approximately 20 “ancient” lakes left on the planet—the province sits on the edge of the taiga forest, peppered with mountainous peaks and jagged wetlands that make vehicular travel impossible and horseback perilous. Surrounding the lake is a national park larger than Yellowstone National Park in the United States.
This work is part of a study to better understand where livestock go, and when, in this region. Led by a climate project coordinator for TNC Mongolia, Dolgor Byambadorj, the study seeks to identify whether livestock are grazing in potentially sensitive or vulnerable areas, such as along rivers or over peatlands.
“We found that sheep are grazing on these peatlands even during the rotation period of the pasture in the area,” says Dolgor. It showed “what [we] feared, but previously we didn’t have proof of.”
The information could help guide the government’s efforts to identify locations for future protection. It’s part of work that TNC has been doing more broadly: The organization’s scientists have contributed mapping expertise across many regions to identify critical areas for conservation, such as river headwaters and sensitive permafrost zones over peatlands.
With optimal grazing practices, Mongolia’s grasslands could store an estimated 16 million tons of carbon that otherwise would contribute to global warming. Its peatlands, though less studied, are critical, too. Globally, peatlands cover only 3% of the Earth’s land area, and yet they hold double the amount of carbon that the world’s forests do. Because peatlands are waterlogged, they limit decomposition of organic material. But if exposed and allowed to dry out, this function fails and they release their vast carbon stores into the atmosphere.
Scientists don’t yet know how much carbon Mongolia’s peatlands store. To begin to answer this question, TNC scientists in 2023 took soil core samples from the same region as the grazing study. Once they identify where peatlands exist and how much carbon they store, the information can help guide grazing management and prevent the disruption of the permafrost layer that currently sits on top of the peat.
For example, after the grazing study showed livestock were moving through peatland areas, conservationists suggested a change. “We are planning on fencing a new area of peatland in Khövsgöl,” says Dolgor. They also plan to work with the local community to emphasize the importance of peatlands.
As herders, rangers, scientists and officials all begin to work under the Eternal Mongolia framework to protect the landscapes that exist in Mongolia today—and the livelihoods that rely on them—the peatlands work speaks to something slightly different. Mongolia’s climate is already changing, but if communities can protect these carbon-storing landscapes in time, they might be able to slow further changes ahead.
“We need to reject the notion that things have always been this way,” that herds have lived in hardship and that land has always been degraded, says Gala. “As we conduct more research and work with local communities, we discover that things have not always been this way, and we are now in a position to shift toward adaptation that is not only feasible but also beneficial to all of us.”
About the Creators
Matthieu Paley is a French photographer based in Portugal whose work covering people and the environment has appeared in National Geographic.
Anand Tumurtogoo is a freelance journalist based in Ulaanbaatar. His work has appeared in ProPublica and Foreign Policy magazine, among others.
Issue 4, 2025
Forever Wild
In 2008, The Nature Conservancy bought thousands of acres of Adirondack forest, including the historic Follensby Pond. Now, part of the area will open to the public for the first time in 100 years.
The Secret South
From the southern Appalachians to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, Alabama’s waterways conceal hidden worlds that are ancient, biodiverse and increasingly at risk.
Call of the Wild
Field biologist and bioacoustic researcher Maia Persche listens to the woods, recording soundscapes that can reveal insights about biodiversity and habitat management.