For nomads eking out a living by herding animals on Mongolia’s vast steppes, the deadliest winters used to come only once a decade, freezing the grasslands into solid ice or coating everything with so much snow that livestock died of cold or hunger en masse.
Now the frigid “dzud” winters come every other year, if not annually. It’s a tragic knock-on effect of the climate change rapidly drying and desertifying the nation throughout the other seasons.
Last year was particularly brutal, killing livestock by the hundreds of thousands and stranding herding families, who make up at least a third of Mongolia’s 3.3 million people, without access to food, animal feed or medicine.
Traversing the almost boundless expanse of a sparsely populated nation more than twice the size of Texas has become impossible in all but a fraction of its territory. Over 90% of the country is now at “high risk,” the United Nations’ office in Mongolia warned earlier this month. When a dzud settled over Mongolia in 2018 and killed 700,000 heads of livestock, it was a record death toll. So far this year upward of 2 million livestock animals have died, according to official statistics, though some aid workers estimate that the number could be as much as five times higher. And this is just the beginning: The die-off isn’t expected to peak until sometime in the next two months.
For herders whose entire wealth consists of sheep, goats and horses, as well as the meat and dairy that those animals can produce, the winter spells financial ruin ― and the potential end of a traditional lifestyle passed down over thousands of generations.
“The herders were saying that they feel [like] vomiting when the snow comes,” Temuujin Munkhbat, an aid worker for the Mongolia affiliate of the British charity Save the Children, told HuffPost after he returned from delivering food, medicine and vitamins to nomadic families. “It is a traumatic experience.”
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