Mongolia Gets UN Help to Face Environmental Degradation

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia, August 22, 2003 (ENS) - The Mongolian Ministry of Nature and Environment and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today signed a framework agreement to support sustainable development and environmental protection in the northeast Asian country.

Ulambayar Barsbold, Mongolian Minister for Nature and Environment, and UNEP Regional Director Surendra Shrestha signed the agreement at the ministry's headquarters in Ulaanbaatar.

Shrestha said the agreement is part of UNEP's commitment to building capacity for integrated and effective environmental management at the national level in Asia and the Pacific.

Mongolian mountain range (Photo courtesy Government of Mongolia)

Under the framework agreement UNEP will provide assistance in the areas of environmental assessment and monitoring and the preparation of National Sustainable Development Strategies.

Programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use of ozone depleting substances will be established similar to those UNEP has underway in other Asia and Pacific countries.

Capacity in law and policy making, fund mobilization and international environmental negotiations will be built in Mongolia as part of the agreement.

The landlocked nation is nearly three times the size of France and holds within its borders super-arid desert, moist taiga forest, rolling steppe grasslands and glaciated alpine peaks.

Some of the last populations of endangered snow leopard, Argali sheep, wild ass, saiga, bacterian camel and Gobi bear are still to be found here.

The latest Mongolian state of the environment report prepared by UNEP in 2002 shows that recent transitions to a market economy from centralized policies of rapid urbanization and industrialization have accelerated risks to the environment.

Horses graze on some of Mongolia's remaining fertile grassland (Photo courtesy Government of Mongolia)

For the nearly one million residents of Ulaanbaatar, declining air quality is causing an increasing number of people to fall ill with respiratory diseases, especially during the winter.

City residents inhale pollution from fossil fuel power plants, hundreds of heating boilers, 75,000 open fires in traditional Mongolian tents and wood homes, and the emissions of 50,000 vehicles now on the streets of the capital.

Mongolian government efforts to formulate effective laws and policies for natural resources and environmental protection are foundering on a population increase of 1.8 percent a year, one of the highest in Asia. Consumer pressures are impacting natural resources, the UNEP assessment found.

Out on the land, livestock grazing is still an important source of income for Mongolians, but as much as 70 percent of the country's pasturelands are in a degraded state, particularly the land around towns and cities.

The thin soils are eroding, resulting in losses in plant diversity, the UN agency says, and wheat yields are half that of the 1980s, due to declining soil fertility.

The growing frequency and intensity of dust and sand storms, which also affect China, the Korean peninsula and Japan, has led UNEP and other international agencies to initiate a multi-million dollar regional project to research and address the problem.

As a result, sand cover has increased 8.7 percent over the past four decades, until today more than 40 percent of Mongolian territory is arid desert.

Mongolian forest grove (Photo courtesy Government of Mongolia)

As the forests vanish, flash floods, lowered groundwater, desertification, and species loss take their place.

Last August, Barsbold told delegates from 27 countries at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Commission in Ulaanbaatar that major challenges for Mongolian forest management were unregulated and unsustainable timber harvesting, forest fires, insect and disease attacks, regeneration difficulties, and limited institutional capacity.

The UNEP assessment recognizes that while environmental resources provide an important base for expanded economic opportunity through mining, forestry, farming and tourism, integrated national sustainable development policies and planning are "desperately needed." It is these skills that UNEP is offering to Mongolia.