Managing “climate migration” in Mongolia: The importance of development policies

Abstract

Each winter, tens of thousands of destitute Mongolian herders move to the insalubrious suburbs that surround Ulaanbaatar (“ger districts”). This migration can partly be attributed to climate change, as a rapid warming and a slight change in the precipitation patterns (decrease in summer precipitations) reduce the yield of the grassland. On the other hand, the resilience of nomadic animal husbandry declined markedly since the collapse of the communist regime in 1990: the “Age of the Market” and the imposition of a radical neoliberal ideology led to the interruption of the services indispensable to the traditional Mongolian way of life (e.g. boarding schools, mobile health brigades, but also veterinary services and a centralized system of fodder production and distribution that mutualizes environmental risks). Thus, this chapter shows that, in the context of Mongolia’s internal migration, climate change adaptation is inseparable from domestic development policies that, it is argued, need urgently to be rectified.